Can I buy a £50 template?

[jamiefsmith]

This is a site i like the design of,quite a simple design to acheive with some tweaks

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/

[jont]

My thoughts are :

A unique theme without support £500
A non unique theme without support £150

support charged at £25 per email

These are realistic prices, now the million dollar Q is would you pay....

bearing in mind that there is always are difference between what you would like to pay and what you should pay.

I would certainly second Jo's prices. The amount of work involved in creating a new theme is considerable and does require a certain level of knowledge and experience in using Actinic. It is not as simple as downloading an open source template or even a paid for HTML template - Actinic just will not work with it.

I spent almost all last week creating a new CSS theme for a new site - around 70 hours of man-power - the VAST majority was getting the Actinic suff to work with the basic HTML/CSS template I had created in just a few hours. £500.00 for the amount of time and effort involved is not unreasonable for a bespoke design - thankfully I was the customer, designer and programmer on this job - I did not have to get customer input and make changes left, right and centre.

Like Jo I am also planning on selling themes/templates in the near future and the prices quoted by Jo are exactly what I had in mind. The difficult part to charge for is the level of support required and expected and do the themes allow for NQV colours or are they hardcoded into the CSS etc etc?

The CSS site I am working on at the moment has over 700 lines of code - some of it very complex no matter how much of it is annotated. Someone with a good knowledge of CSS would be able to see and change as required but with even a basic knowledge could be a minefield. There are also changes to the actinic text "ID" to remove tables etc

No matter what template/theme was installed sooner or later the user will want to make changes and tweaks to an off-the-shelf design. How much support are they entitled to? Are they entitled to any? All these areas need consideration and costing accordingly

[george]

Assuming most of your work would be `non unique` 'sites, I'd imagine many of the tweaks would be similar to Actinic's and tend to become repetative. Therefore maybe a forum like this maybe be an idea? Just a thought J & J.