WordPress theme designers

The Business of Selling WordPress Themes: Part 1 | Design Shack

 

o.o Very interesting, never new about WP market or 99 Designs.

 

Me neither. Well, I only found out about 99Designs this past weekend.

Quite a lot of people on Envato are banking on some of their items.

 

99designs is often a huge waste of time for anyone looking to make any decent money.

You'll be competition with people from India and Pakistan that will do much more and spend hours on a 300 dollar job that you have a 1% chance of winning.

Its also getting quite hairy with premium themes for Wordpress that are released. Matt Mullenweg and many other wp developers/designers are now GPL compliant which Matt suggests. Some have made money with it, but it is quite hard. So unless you want to ignore the GPL or take a chance of someone else legally buying then simply redistributing your designs you'll want to think hard before going the premium theme route.

 

What do you mean by the 2nd part?

The process behind 99Designs is stupid, IMHO. Ironically those people who spend so much time happen to be actual freelancers. I've always wondered how some minorities from Asia started design styles a few years ago that are now the "in" thing to do.

 

I agree 100% while I'm not a designer it certainly sucks for you guys. There is a guy that's going out buying GPL themes, tweaking them a bit, and redistributing them for free. I cannot remember the site but he was interviewed by another blog and said he wanted to 'test the GPL'.

While I understand how important the GPL is, I don't think it's the right way to go with themes. I can change one line of CSS and redistribute a paid theme for free. Does that make sense? Is it fair to the designers?

When Matt first announced the whole GPL thing I thought it was a step in the right direction because around that time themes were all over the place with spammy backlinks in the footer and even encrypted footers. Now that's it been over a year there is no doubt that the theme directory on the Codex improved immensely but in reality most people who surf the Codex wouldn't bother buying a theme anyhow.

Encouraging paid themes to be released under the GPL is just plain short sided IMHO. Not very many people have effectively monetized anything GPL, WP basiclly strong arming people into releasing everything as GPL just doesn't sit well with me.

 

Reading through, they must be GPL to be in their directory. Reading around, a lot of people make a simpler version or one that's unsupported by the author that's under GPL, and then a pay version for lifetime support.

Someone can distribute the file and such, but who's going to know what to update? You.

This whole GPL thing sounds like some 60s hippy ploy.


Edit: I just realized this. Coding a WordPress design if you're super good, takes about 3 to 3 and a half days. If you're a medium-paced worker, it'll take you about two weeks. Doing a custom theme for someone costs roughly 450 and under, and I'm taking that figure from some of the top coders for WP.

However, a WordPress PSD design can easily fetch up to 800. I've seen a few go for about 1K, design only. But they were extravagant designs with hundreds of layers. So you gotta think about what would make you more money.

Personally, as this is a hobby for me, I can easily start 10-20 projects in a 6 month time frame and sell them off in the other 6 months while I start other projects. It's hobby income for me, and of course once Mr. Taxman is through with me, I still have a nice sum of money for whatever I do. Compared to regular website building, I just don't see development of WordPress themes really profitable, except the design.

 

What makes a PSD design a bit more valuable than an actual theme already coded? I''m just asking, defo not complaining 'cause this could mean that if I am good enough, I could get worth what I spend time on.

 

Compare an average basic looking paid theme to a really amazing one. There's about a 40-100 dollar difference in what I've seen. Coding takes time, and it can take ages on a very complex design. Of course, if you're designing high quality stuff, and selling it to individual people with the rights, then you don't worry about this GPL issue, you keep your money and you move onto the next project.

 

The Business of Selling WordPress Themes: Part 2 | Design Shack