How To Create And Sell Website Templates

Selling website templates is a great solution for many web developers and creative agencies. A website template allows both the designer and client to apply customization easily and at any time. The trends in web design are ever-changing and if you have an older website...everyone can tell. It is a perk you can offer your clients to say, 5 years down the road when your website is outdated, we can do a refresh, because I sell website templates. You won't need to start from scratch. Watch the conversation below to learn how you can get involves with selling templated websites.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Welcome to our video on how to sell websites and how to sell website templates. I'm Chad Hill and I have Adam Stetzer with me today. Adam how are you doing?

I'm good Chad. Happy New Year and good afternoon. Today we're talking about how to sell website design services, and we're getting deep into selling templated website as the foundation of how to sell website design. So, what are your top points on how to help people get started in the space?

Yeah, great question. To me, the first thing that you always want to look out when you're building a website is how it works. And I think that dollar for dollar, you're going to get the best bang for your buck with websites that look great out of the box when you're using a template. So that's the number one point I want to make: use and sell templated websites. Sell website templates online.

Can we stop there for a second? Because I think a lot people think, well, a website's a website. And if you don't really sell website designs yet, you may not know that the trends actually shift. But when you create websites to sell, there's a lot that goes into it. And I could look at a website-- I think you can too, Chad-- and say, oh, that website was really hot about four years ago, or that's how they built websites in 2002.

And there are certainly trends that are emerging in 2012 and now in 2013 that are hot now that probably even six months ago, I didn't see that much of. So I think what you're saying is, you need to make sure you're current with the styles if you want to sell template websites.

Absolutely. And that really comes down to one of the second things I wanted to mention, is that when you sell template websites, you're basically able to get a whole lot more functionality by using the template than you would if you had to develop it in a custom way for each website that you build. And what I mean by that is there's two things. One is that if you use WordPress as the underlying CMS, which we do, and then you have a template on top of that, you don't have to build the functionality of a blog from scratch. You get that sort of out of the gate with the theme and the template built in.

So that's really good because that means you're not paying to have someone rewrite a blog software, and then having a debug it and go through all the issues that might come up and learning later on that, oh, I really would like to be able to have tags as well as categories. All of that stuff is built in for you. And the other part, of again, how to sell website templates, not only from a visual standpoint, but also the CMS underneath the covers there, is that you get a lot of features that you might forget to ask for.

So for much of the effort you put into sell website templates-- what we're doing, at least, with our temples is that we're putting forth the best case example of what a small business website should have, things like lead gen forms and newsletter capture forms and then a bunch of other features that we think give you the right features and functionality to create an engaging website that's going to generate business for you. So you get that sort of out of the box, which is again, a really big benefit of using a templated website and when you sell template websites.

So to me it comes down to the 80-20 rule, which is people seek all these custom features and functions in their website and they end up driving the cost up far higher than they need to, when if they could just cut out the 20% of very extravagant requests and live with the 87% of which we found, particularly on the WordPress platform CMS and the website templates that we work with and build covers 80% of the functionality, if not more, you could really bring that cost way, way down. So to me the cost benefit of going to the assembly line where you'll just have a better quality control, predictability and a quicker delivery of a very high quality product is worth giving up the 20% for most people. And then, as you say, there is sometimes a business case to create websites to sell that are very expensive and custom.

Agreed. And then the final point I wanted to make is that a lot of times when you sell website templates, the templates allows for you to define those and you have pretty tight controls over what could be done what can't be done, all usually more than you need or at least what you need in most cases. And also one the longer term benefits is that we are turning off a lot of features that over time you might grow into. So you might not necessarily start with a blog,-- although we would recommend you'd want that-- but the benefit of you to sell templated websites is that if down the road, you want to turn on that feature or add a newsletter capture form, if that was something that was defined up front in the newsletter template, it's a relatively small effort to turn that on at a later date, which gives you some flexibility as you grow your website.

Nice. So bottom line, when it comes down to how to sell website design services, the answer really is how to sell website templates. Our pitch is use sell template websites for assembly line construction which is very high quality, very attractive with the latest feature set, but know that product really, really well so that you know where the limitations are, which will steer how to sell website design services and setting expectations. And if you do all those things, you'll have a very happy customer and do quite a bit of volume, which ultimately will make more money.