I have read a lot in this forum and came to realise that it might come handy to ask your opinions about my business idea. Thanks for opening my thread, please read on. First of all I am a freelance web designer with a relatively moderate sized clientele. I put online about one custom website a month. These sites are almost totally customized small to mid-sized projects to fit my clients' needs and these aren't those autoinstaller-cms-cheap-crap stuff. I'm pretty satisfied with the income I am making with this, but I'd like to make a little more money (who else wouldn't?) During the design processes many leftover works remain on my hdd that could be 'recycled'. I wonder if it'd worth starting an online store containing my own designed website templates selling these stuff as stock material. These leftover designs are only in Photoshop format yet but I intend to create ready to use CMS templates for Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, Zen-Cart or whatever the market needs. Additionally if it worths the hassle I could create more stock templates to broaden the product line. Creating templates is really what I like to do, but I won't jump in and invest time in it. Of course I own full rights of these as they didn't become a part of any project. I suppose I could start the store with around 20-30 individual designs, of course porting those to different platforms thus making around 70-100 products. I can add at least 3-4 designs per month to the collection. I find that the most time-consuming and 'pain-in-the-back' part of the work is coding the template to CMS engines. I could do it easily and this might raise the value of my would-be products. What do you think? Any suggestions are welcome.
If you want some more templates in bulk, please contact me... I have a templates package in PSD and HTML format around thousands of templates
Thanks for your offer ShReYaS, but I am initially thinking of selling my own designs mainly because I trust the quality of my own work and that might be easier to communicate through. Of course it depends on which is more important: quality or volume.
I think if you have leftover designs, you could perhaps develop a website and then once you have it for a few months and market it a bit, you can turn around and sell it for much more. Personally, if I bought a template I wouldn't pay much at all for it simply because I know I can come here or other places and get a pretty decent unique template for around $50.00 or sometimes even less.
Hi Melon, Absolutely. If you really have cool designs, you can definetely create a market and start your own e-commerce store of templates. You can also sell your templates from already famous providers like templatemonster.com. You will get a readymade market.
Hi Melon, This is great to hear from you about this business, we also design, and with lots of left overs. I think this would the best idea to start with your own, as you already have some clientage to start with. Have some good marketing tecticks with you. In starting have a free offering, and low rate. When you have a solid # of customer you can improve that further.... Best of luck for that...
Thatz a good idea to here.You can outsource ur work to India or others, and get the work done at cheap rates.
you can earn $$$ fast and outsource from all over world. the main thing is that if you have good designs then you will get more and more work with in few days, becuase there is lot of work for templates everyone want a different and god lookign templete for his site
I would say give em away for free for awhile and once you get a good client base start selling your newer ones at a reasonable rate. You have to keep in mind there are other big companies doing this already so you need to offer something better and cheaper and start a good foundation of clients.
Thanks for everyone sharing your thoughts. Yes, I'm thinking of giving away a few designs (like I'm doing it now - I should only do this in a more decent way) and then I'd start selling. I know that there are big companies out there but I have somethnig they typically can't offer: premium quality stuff. I've seen stock Wordpress themes sold for $50 which I wouldn't want even if I was offered money to take it And indeed it'd need a reasonable price range, has to be cheaper than the competition _and_ has to be better quality.
Starting a template store needs a lot of dedication to not only the products but the customers too. And there is a LOT of competition out there these days, so before jumping into it think twice about the niche/project.
You would probably be better off doing custom designs for people on the forum; you'll have someone directing you, telling you what they want and also you will probably get paid more.
That is true, thanks for the advice. No offense, but that would be the one of the last thing I'm willing to do I am satisfied with my clientele and I just want to recycle my unused designs in my freetime. Actually I don't want to make thousands out of it, just give it a try to see if it works or not. Anyway thanks for the response.