When offering Wordpress as a service to clients, are you expected to develop them a theme from scratch or adapt an existing theme to a design (more like a child theme)?
I'm more of a designer than a developer and the thought of developing a theme from scratch haunts me.
and please please please, if you are going to modify themes, do not charge the same price as developing from scratch...
There are a few guys locally that buy templates and charge a minimum of $2000 just to add 5 pages of content and a logo and they have absolutely NO coding experience whatsoever...which is complete bullsh**.
So, just make sure you are pricing your services properly...It pisses me off to see un-honest people taking away work from us guys who put in the time to learn everything and do it the right way.
@jshjohnson I'm a letterer (former web designer) and I was the same way. I use a pre-made blank template. It's completely stripped of styling and just adds the very basic content. This allows you to build it up for what the project needs.
Since Chris posted a screencast long ago on how to go from PSD to Wordpress and used a specific theme called "Starkers" (which does the same thing), everyone will recommend it. However, it's really "bulky" and I never liked it. Below is a template I have used for a while now and can't say enough about it.
I have had a similar experience. I am a graphic designer learning to code my own sites but I had a client who wanted to control her backend so Wordpress became a better option. What i did was explain that I was going to use a template and purchase the bundle to customize the css so that she would be able to control her text but I would control the design, even if a small amount of it. I was honest and explained that she could do the process without me and save some money or I could do it, and then train her on it. She went with that and I charged $350 to set the whole thing up and then do Wordpress training too. Really she paid me for the hand holding but sometimes that is all a client wants.
I concur - when we've ever just configured templates, we call a spade a spade and there is a clear difference between "custom design" versus "template customization". At the end it ends up being just a consulting fee for the hand holding piece of it.
When offering Wordpress as a service to clients, are you expected to develop them a theme from scratch or adapt an existing theme to a design (more like a child theme)?
I'm more of a designer than a developer and the thought of developing a theme from scratch haunts me.
Cheers,
Josh
If developing a theme from scratch haunts you, my recommendation would be to partner with somebody that doesn't think such scary thoughts!
There are a few guys locally that buy templates and charge a minimum of $2000 just to add 5 pages of content and a logo and they have absolutely NO coding experience whatsoever...which is complete bullsh**.
So, just make sure you are pricing your services properly...It pisses me off to see un-honest people taking away work from us guys who put in the time to learn everything and do it the right way.
Since Chris posted a screencast long ago on how to go from PSD to Wordpress and used a specific theme called "Starkers" (which does the same thing), everyone will recommend it. However, it's really "bulky" and I never liked it. Below is a template I have used for a while now and can't say enough about it.
Template
@kgscott284 You'd really love my former employer then.