Selling Your WordPress Themes
Vootie (1482 pencils) | Sat, 2010-09-11 16:23
Excerpted from Build Your Own Wicked
WordPress Themes (SitePoint)
By Allan Cole, Raena Jackson Armitage, Brandon R. Jones & Jeffrey Way
So, you’ve built a gorgeous, usable, robust, and customizable theme. Now what? It’s time to take it to market! As designers and developers, it can be difficult to make the shift into becoming salespeople for the stuff we build, so this is intended as a guide to the world of selling WordPress themes.
It's a common misconception that, because WordPress—and consequently, any themes developed on top of it—is bound to the General Public License (GPL), designers are unable to profit from selling them. Luckily, this is far from the truth.
We’ll start by deconstructing this myth, and move into what you can do to make your theme more attractive to buyers, finally touching on the mechanics of selling themes.
Read further on Graphics.com
Commenting on this Blog entry is closed.
i am so sick of all this templated, themed, cookie-cutter horseshit out there!
what desktop publishing did to print, youtube did to video and now these templated CMS things are doing to the web. the whole expectation of quality and integrity of the user experience is being watered down and compromised by people who shouldnt be jacking with it in the first place...
similar to what microsoft and the "powerpoint mentality" did to the state of business communication...
So from your perspective, every WordPress user should create their own site design from scratch or hire a designer to do so?
"So from your perspective, every WordPress user should create their own site design from scratch or hire a designer to do so?"
well, thats what we tell every non-designer who comes here with a cheapo, off-shore, out-sourced, templated, "my nephew has corel draw", attempt at a logo. so i cant see why the sentiment should differ for web design...
but it really depends on the purpose of the site.
personally. yes. i think. all "designs" should at least attempt to be original.
especially in THIS context - e.g. a design/creativity forum. i think wordpress and drupal/joomla/et al type templated approaches defeat the purpose of our discussion...
not to say they dont have their place. this just isnt it.
its like trying to sell slice and bake cookies in a bakery. slice and bake is fine. but its for the grocery store. NOT a bakery.
So then you don't approve of Roger Black selling his design templates on Ready-Media.com?
no. not really. minimizing the design role is minimizing the design role. i dont care whos doing it.
Well, how about this: WordPress 3 has been downloaded more than 14 million times in the last few months siince its release. I think you would agree that there are simply not enough designers to create great-looking designs for these sites from scratch, even if all 14 million users had the resources to have their site designed uniquely for them. And yet, how sad to leave such people at the mercy of those flogging mediocre free or, for the most part, tepid commercial templates.
The point of the book was that this represented a significant opportunity for designers to get their work in the hands of a very broad customer base. The idea is not so different from a core tenet of the Bauhaus, after all, which believed that the artistic spirit and mass-production were not inseparable. What's needed are not crappy, inflexible templates. But beautifully designed ones, that users can easily modify to meet their needs. How is that not a worthy objective?
I hope the author covered one crucial idea in his book:
ELIMINATE THE MIDDLE MAN. Many sites take incredible fees off the hard work of Wordpress theme designers, so the end goal of each WP designer should be to eventaully have his own service/website where he sells his work.
Best regards,
Darren, editor of http://www.findermind.com Magazine
The book doesn't cover that as much as I would have liked. But there's a reason photographers use sites like iStockphoto -- they sell more that way. The same holds true when selling WordPress templates.
Templates have there place, I merely see them as a source of inspiration.
Graphic Design Manchester