Hate to say this but....

The designs seem to sale so of course people are going to continue to create what sales. I have come to the conclusion that people don't want lavish designs for the most part. Maybe for a arcade template of something but certainly not a wordpress blog. At one point everyone wanted a lot of bells and whistles (flash animations etc.) but now simple designs seem to be the "in" thing.

^I would like to see also. I think it may also encourage designers to step out of the box and start creating what you consider better designs.

 

Yes shamus I know exactly what you mean. I have that designers eye were you see a template and within half a second you know if its shite or alright.
I work for a web design company and my designs are worth 1000 dollars not coded. Im not even the "greatest" designer around. You can see amazing designs selling for 50 dollars and its just sad, bringing the value of web designs down.
All designers, you should start pricing all your designs for a minimum of 250 dollars each. 350 coded. Then from there bring it up more and more. Dont sell the first template you ever made. Infact, dont sell the first 20 you make. Wait untill you are good, you will know when you are. Then start selling. I myself have thrown out many templates that are 50 times better than alot of the templates on here because I didnt think they were quality enough for a customer to use.

Anyone who's thinking of buying a shit design for 30 dollars because its all you can afford. Ignore. Visit http://templatefusion.org. Its my site, you can download a free template. If you like the free template, you can pay me 10 $ to legally remove the copyright. My templates are loads better than most you will find here.

-Sean Pollock

 

Really? Says you're 14 years old on your portfolio.

http://sean-pollock.com/about.php

Heading two.

 

Do a search for 'Katy' then come back.

 

I am 14 years old.

 

You're right. But this is digitalpoint. Try sitepoint, you find much more quality because people pay much more for the quality there. I have tried to sell "premium" templates here for even less then what they are worth. It doesn't work here hardly ever. I use this forum to clear out old .PSD's that have been sitting on my hard drive for quite some time and were designed for someone who wanted that kind of quality- even then hey most likely wont sell.

So people here try to make it as cheap as possible because people here want to pay as little as possible for something that they should be paying twice, three or four times that. This forum is like some "wholesale" place. Not much of a market place for quality in my opinion.

People here don't realize that some of the themes i've sold on sitepoint that didn't even get bid on here have been bought up and re-sold for licensing fee and they've made 10x in a month then what I sold it for... and i know thats possible because i do the same and make passive income for 2 days work- and it gets a return month after month. It's almost sometimes a favor to try and sell something here for $200...

I usually get the same complaint here: "Lower your starting bid please!" but the starting bid will only be around $50 for a top quality advance magazine type theme you see selling for a one-time (with no rights) for $99 license fee... which can be sold hundreds of times over.

But when you see post titles like "Unique! Amazing! Premium" its only because they are trying to get someone to click it... 99% of the time it's the same blocked out design: Gradient Header, Horribly margined/positioned divisioned content area, same cut-and-paste WP tags for the sidebar, and a repeat of the header for the footer.

Thats just my experience here, but i agree 100% with you.

 

I did a topic search on you and seen the templates you sell and a post check to see the ones you bought, and on template fusion how many templates did you buy? Because I have seen some of them being sold here on DP.

 

I just wish there was a separate section for what I call 'pictures of templates', uncoded, and one for actual templates, i.e. coded, to make it easier for me to go through the the proper templates and ignore all the 30-minute mock-ups.

 

I was going to post something similar to what alexjstubbs said. Some members here just aren't willing to buy a WordPress theme for what it is worth, which is why there are so many price decreases and rarely any quality designs. It's just not worth it here, especially if you have to code the design.

Maybe if some that are interested or have an idea that may make the design better, would go to some threads and say if you make such and such modification I will buy it for more than what you asking for or you will get more interested, and if you keep up with such modifications in your future themes, I or others will be interested, maybe this will help some post better designs.

But it's not just WordPress themes that are suffering from low quality or prices. B/S/T value has gone down because of the international market, and junk posts. With the international market, there are some where $1 is a lot of money and thus will sell their services for a very low price. I know it's great to have a lower price than your competitor, but the price drops so low it's ridiculous.

 

I havent sold a template on here forever, not worth my time, and I looked at your threads, sorry. I only buy coded ones.

 

After seeing this comment on a design I thought was rather nice

I think all the designers should go on strike What would be nice is to a well organized template forum for quality designs. Still amazed at some of the designs not even selling and some of lower quality ones sell like hot cakes.

 

WE SHOULD GO ON STRIKE? Cool!

Heres the scenario:

A Designer spends 48 hours on a rather quality design and they post it here on dp and everyone goes "lower the price" but you spent awful lot of time working on it so why would you want to lower it?.. *lightbulb*why not make a 30 mins template sell it for $30.. [then most of the time this one gets sold faster..]

a rather recent example: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=649930
(sorry not in the mood to look for more threads.. but you get the point..)

 

Well yeah, but all those too high posts are by numpties, people with no iTrader and a handful of posts, in fact I usually just assume that those kinds of accounts are owned by the same person. You see them all the time from both sides, buying and selling - "Oo, what a great offer this is, if I had the money I would definitely buy it" says the guy with two posts and the same typing style as the seller... or "the price is a bit high" repeat x 3 or 4 with my other crappy accounts and they might lowers it then, ta da! I sweep in with my 3 point iTrader account and buy it cheap.

Anyway, this is a little paranoid I guess, but I always assume that new accounts making negative or positive comments in any buy or sell thread as suspicious and ignore them when it comes to deciding on buying something.

 

Blogsip is right. I'm from the UK. A $ here is worth .50p. A mars bar costs about .50p. !0 smokes costs £2.90 ($6). I make templates for DP simpler because I know i'm not going to get my money back.

I really do get around £50 p/h for my work, for quite simple xHTML/CSS with a bit of custom AJAX. I know i'm not going to get that here with the competition from Asia/USA etc.

I am, however, working on a HQ WP theme, for sponsorship here though. It's going to be free on my Portfolio (after it's monday launch) and availble elswhere. I am putting a lot of work into it, Custom Vectors from Illustrator etc, custom Typography.

I'll let you know how it goes and post back on this thread, i'm going to be looking for a good $150 min really, so it will be interesting to see if people will pay that much for a truly modern template with genuine custom AJAX.

 

I have noticed 'them' too. It's pretty anoying when others 'play fair'

Marc

 

When I make good designs to sell, I go to places like namepros and sitepoint, primarily because generally, people are extremely cheap on here. They see crap designs and begin to go for gold quality designs for crap prices. If you want something good, you will pay for it, or either know someone who can hook you up well. I honestly get tired of people complaining about making a good design and selling it for cheap. Real designers actually access time spent and value in their work and also literally think up something creative; in which that creativity, comes at a cost to the consumer.

Also not based on race but on correlation is the fact that you will find a lot of foreigners on this board in particular because of the low regulations. On sitepoint, you have to pay money to make listings, namepros primarily has good moderation, even staggered in some boards. Many foreigners on these boards lack the skill to do anything on the level that say, an american college student could do. Ive seen better work from american and european kids than I have seen from older indians who claim to have been doing work for longer than the american kid was born. And also foreigners drag the price down along with quality. Again, not meant to be racist, these are strictly my findings. However I do work with some foreigners who actually do good work but most of the time their prices will come close to an American's pricing however it may be slightly cheaper. I have no problem with that as long as they do good work; which usually expect a minimum price anyhow.

So to complain about crappy designs for paying low prices is like punching a concrete wall. This is in almost every industry, you buy crap, you get, well you guessed it, crap.

 

This is true, but I think one of the major problems with this subforum is search. You need to be able to search things like this by price, style, and keywords in order to have some chance of getting the quality you're after.

Introducing more sub-forums to the B/S/T section based on the value of the template would help, I think.

 

Shamus you come up with good point but dont get one thing.

Designs for 30$ will never be compared to 100$ and uppper.
these designes which people sell in here are quick projects done for low budget or people who wont bother speding so much money on a site.

If you dont like what you see over here you can stop browsing this section everyone happy- end of the day.

I can ensure you that I personally opened a thread which I offer some templates for sale, I know they are not amazing and totally outstanding cause if they were I wouldnt sell them just like that.

I also work for a company that sells custom sites and I get paid for each site a price that is worth for a request template.

Over here , on this spesific section people create whatever come to their minds and sell it to whoever wants it, that is the main reason for the low price and less quality- its a marketplace dont forget.

moreover, saying amazing and such I dont like either.

 

I just had a look on NamePros, seems to be worse over there, some really really poor stuff and people asking for $10.

 

lol thats brilliant

Yes, one of the only site where I see great templates Talkfreelance