I know it is often said that Freeway is about creating unique designs from scratch but some of us are not full time designers and would welcome the idea of having more templates to choose from. This is partly because it could cut out some of the technical work but also because they would probably look considerably better if the original theme was put together by a talented designer.
I can understand to some extent if Softpress doesn’t want to spend time creating free templates to include with Freeway but isn’t there an opening here for an online shop selling Freeway templates either via Softpress or perhaps the Apple Store? The creators could earn money on each sale so presumably it would be profitable if done properly.
I’d be curious to know what others think because I feel this is one area where less advanced Freeway users could benefit from more options.
Thanks DTP2 I had never seen that site. It still only has 5 templates though. I think more could be achieved if Softpress put their weight behind this.
I agree that more templates would be nice. However, Freeway doesn’t lend itself very well to a template-driven workflow. It gives too much control to the template users, which can actually be a bad thing.
I’d love to build templates for Freeway Pro, I have people emailing me
demanding responsive templates and such. Yet what I find when I do release
them is that people almost instantly want to do something the template
isn’t designed to do, and complain. Or they don’t understand how the
template is supposed to work and break it, then complain that it wasn’t
ignorance proof.
I’m no expert Ernie and only knock together a site very occasionally but I like being able to make small updates myself when needed and I find Freeway allows me to do that without needing to look too hard at the coding.
On a technical level I can generally get things to work adequately after a degree of kicking and tears with the help of this forum but a good designer does so much more than simply producing something functional. They create websites that are visually attractive, appropriate for purpose and immediately persuade the visitor to stick around rather than hitting the back button within half a second.
Overall I find myself in a tricky situation because I don’t want to work with something like iWeb that offers very little flexibility and has major limitations but equally I’ll admit I sometimes struggle just to come up with an attractive modern looking design myself in Freeway. Softpress didn’t include any new templates with FW6 from what I can tell and I gather the ones mentioned by Caleb are fairly old now. I would welcome more stylish templates and happily buy them from a store if they were good.
I’ve talked about Softpress’ marketing of FW as a WYSIWYG program in another post but if you are serious about building a professional site and you’re not willing to get to grips with CSS, HTML and inline layouts, keep on designing your sites in Photoshop and hire a developer to build it for you. No matter how many templates you use, FW is not InDesign.
…which is the problem for a designer selling templates. A low sensible price means no support (bought as seen). To offer even limited support would definitely mean a far higher cost. Both of these options is something the purchaser is probably not looking for.
David Owen
On 21 Feb 2013, at 17:22, Ernie Simpson email@hidden wrote:
Yet what I find when I do release
them is that people almost instantly want to do something the template
isn’t designed to do, and complain. Or they don’t understand how the
template is supposed to work and break it, then complain that it wasn’t
ignorance proof.
all of which, while liked, have yet to raise enough revenue to keep my
website running for a single month. Also, all built with inline layouts.
So, all I’m trying to get off my chest here is that if the Template Wanters
are frustrated – so are the Template Makers.
This one, anyways.
–
Ernie Simpson
On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 1:34 PM, David Owen <
email@hidden> wrote:
…which is the problem for a designer selling templates. A low sensible
price means no support (bought as seen). To offer even limited support
would definitely mean a far higher cost. Both of these options is something
the purchaser is probably not looking for.
On 21 Feb 2013, at 17:22, Ernie Simpson email@hidden wrote:
Yet what I find when I do release
them is that people almost instantly want to do something the template
isn’t designed to do, and complain. Or they don’t understand how the
template is supposed to work and break it, then complain that it wasn’t
ignorance proof.
Plus, you’re investing a lot of time building proprietary templates for a small very specific community so it’s already a challenge to get back what you put into it unless you also sell the template source code through traditional template resource sites in the hopes of reaching a larger audience and recouping your investment. I guess it all depends on what you want, expect and need to get out of it as to whether it’s a worthwhile pursuit.
Todd
…which is the problem for a designer selling templates. A low sensible price means no support (bought as seen). To offer even limited support would definitely mean a far higher cost. Both of these options is something the purchaser is probably not looking for.
I hope you didn’t think I was suggesting you should be doing all these templates yourself Ernie because I certainly didn’t mean that. I didn’t know about the other things you had done either.
As a rule of thumb I don’t think asking for donations works very well on the internet but just for the sake of comparison I have purchased several templates for the iBook Author application at various price points and I’ll probably buy more in the future just as I have purchased some Freeway actions in the past.
I do understand your frustration but perhaps that is all the more reason why this needs Softpress to get involved on some level. I am inclined to think they’d sell far more copies of Freeway if existing and potential users had access to a commercial store where a wide array of modern professional looking templates could be purchased online.
Now that I’m neck deep in developing a responsive template, the whole pricing thing has become quite important to me! On one hand, I need to recoup at least some of my time expenses. The average web designer makes close to $40 per hour, and I’ve spent something like 20 hours so far (and I’m not done yet), which means I would have to make something like $1000 off of the template just to cover my time.
However, if you overprice, then people won’t purchase it and those do are more likely to be disappointed (you can’t complain about free stuff!).
One other advantage to charging more for a more advanced template like Backdraft is that the people who are more likely to require support are less likely to purchase it, which means less support time in the long term.
Somewhere in between there is supposed to be a happy medium. However, I’m not sure that exists with Freeway, as there are just too few users.
One thing that has always interested me was the success of RapidWeaver. Almost all of the add-ons are paid, and some are quite expensive. Some people say that you have to shell out at least $100 for add-ons alone just to create websites using that software, and yet RapidWeaver has a HUGE and happy user-base.
How is it that RapidWeaver got people so accustomed to purchasing everything? I don’t know, but would like to.
…a trend years ago was to purchase CD image libraries. They appealed so much and the goodies looked so tasty, offering the perfect design solution. But in practice bulk library images we’ve bought just never got used on the real world jobs they never quite fitted. They were a waste of money and time for us and only benefited the seller. This is the fundamental problem with any template/quick fix.
Perhaps what is needed is education to build your own sites or just hire a designer to do the job properly (or in the example above a photographer).
David Owen
On 21 Feb 2013, at 18:58, Todd email@hidden wrote:
Plus, you’re investing a lot of time building proprietary templates for a small very specific community so it’s already a challenge to get back what you put into it unless you also sell the template source code through traditional template resource sites in the hopes of reaching a larger audience and recouping your investment. I guess it all depends on what you want, expect and need to get out of it as to whether it’s a worthwhile pursuit.
…which is the problem for a designer selling templates. A low sensible price means no support (bought as seen). To offer even limited support would definitely mean a far higher cost. Both of these options is something the purchaser is probably not looking for.
I think it’s because the Rapidweaver templates are fairly bulletproof and all you do is enter your content.
David Owen
On 21 Feb 2013, at 19:28, “Caleb Grove” email@hidden wrote:
One thing that has always interested me was the success of RapidWeaver. Almost all of the add-ons are paid, and some are quite expensive. Some people say that you have to shell out at least $100 for add-ons alone just to create websites using that software, and yet RapidWeaver has a HUGE and happy user-base.
I do understand your frustration but perhaps that is all the more reason why this needs Softpress to get involved on some level. >
Ashley
thats right - without this outstandig fwt and softpress support it can be a nightmare, getting sites to work properly … so more templates, more demos/vidoes/tutorials would be helpful. have you ever searched specific info on softpress website (like the list of actions incompatible to fw6?).
i agree with marcel, its more effective and less expansive for me as designer, if you hire a professional programmer to code your design (which i do for most of my clients). but i still like creating “live-demos” with and it keeps my understanding of web and web-techniques up-to-date.
i know freeway since its beginnings and its getting more and more complex (as a german user still more), of course justified through the progress of the web. meanwhile its UI is very confusing - for those freeway was made for.
I started out some years ago with Freeway befuddled by it’s quirkiness, and wondering why there were so very few templates and no active community or ongoing development of them. But the response was valid - it’s too easy to customize your own and too many variable tools to make templates viable. It has become even easier to use since then!
But for me - all I wanted to do was learn how Freeway worked through backwards engineering. I’m still doing that again now trying to learn responsive design.
I don’t know if I’m in the majority or minority group here, but I’ve used FW for some time and my code skills are almost none - I don’t know anything about styles or CSS from the technical side - and I’m pretty sure I only know about 10% of what Freeway can actually do. Despite the large amount of code related talk in the forum, I suspect I’m probably the average knowledge level user.
But - I don’t just want to cut, copy paste, or stick to preset templates - I want to know why things work the way they do when I put them on a page - how they are constructed - so I can build my own from scratch. Templates are attractive to me for the lessons they represent.
Why Softpress hasn’t hosted a centralized community marketplace for templates and resources is still a mystery. Such type of aftermarket support would do a great deal towards reinforcing the platform and attracting new users. As it is - it’s kind of all over the place - find what you may… some deep resources and other fledgling ones.
I might have quit FW long ago if it weren’t for this forum though - so many thanks to Walter - and the many other supporters - Ernie, David and all!
I will have monthly templates for version 6. Some of them will be free. Hope this helps. I can work on more templates for freeway, it all depends on the feedback I get.
I will have monthly templates for version 6. Some of them will be free. Hope this helps. I can work on more templates for freeway, it all depends on the feedback I get.
Being a relative newby less than 1year) I found Freeway by accident. I had hand coded all my work over the
years, but as I got older (77) and css, and all the other more complicated coding (and capabilties) happened I got left behind.
Suffice to say that I do understand basic coding, but the newer tools (last 7-8) years have been difficult for me to use properly.
Maybe it is because at my age C.R.S. can be a real problem!
I will be interested in whatever templates you come up with. I only have a few clients, and maybe a “boilerplate” template type thing could be used in a majority of the non-artistic community.
