Thread

If we take a look at widespread blogging platforms (like Wordpress) we can find lots of sites offering professional looking, commercial templates.

What do you think? Is there a market for this in the EE sphere - or are EE users less likely use a template and more likely to have custom design created?

- bjorn

Eh, i dunno. I think EE caters a little more web designers / developers that WP. I think (and hope) people will stick with custom designs. But I’ll be interested to hear what other think on this subject.

I look at it this way - because EE is so flexible any template library on the web is an EE template library.  I’ve done a small number of projects that didn’t have the budget for both a custom design and the EE work, so we found a template for sale commercially and just plugged in EE.

If this is something you want to do then why not create a theme and offer it for all the major platforms including EE?

I think you could make the design even more attractive if you offered a matching forum and wiki theme.

I don’t know if it would be worth your time but I believe more people would start with EE if they could get a set of decent looking templates that they can learn to customize over time.

I may well be in the minority, but at this moment: Yes, I’d pay for a theme (though not a whole lot).  In fact, I found this thread while searching (in futility) for EE themes.

Yes, I can code HTML in Notepad/TextMate/vi, and have, and probably will.  But my goal at the moment is to put up a working web site, not to design one.  That’ll come later, once I have some, you know, content.

So it’d be nice to have some choices.  Especially one that took good advantage of embedded templates, CSS, etc. so that it WAS more malleable later, in an iterative way.

I’m not sure how much of a market there is for just EE themes compared to WordPress.  EE doesn’t allow for 1-click theme changes so it makes it very difficult for someone to install a new theme.

You might be able to develope some kind of templating standard that uses a common set of embeds and page elements to make theme changing easier.

You might be able to develope some kind of templating standard that uses a common set of embeds and page elements to make theme changing easier.

Exactly.  I think MT just went through this with their “Universal Theme”... If it’s well-designed and DRY, it shouldn’t be that hard to change underlying elements.  If it’s not well-designed, well… why should I pay? 😊