Making Custom Joomla Templates Affordable!

So you realized that free Joomla templates aren't going to cut it quality wise, and professional Joomla templates look great but 50 people have the same one; you want something unique; you want a custom Joomla template. Let me stop right here and say, even though we can do custom templates for you at Joomla Packages, its not our business, we put together whole sites, and templates are just a small part of that. I want instead to iterate once something I know I'll be saying over and over to our customers: custom Joomla templates can be expensive. A custom template is unique, its exactly what you want, and it should express your brand better than any free Joomla templates, or even a quality pro template. So, when you're spending money on a custom Joomla template you should either not think about expense or you should learn how to minimize what you pay when you're dealing with a developer.

How do you minimize costs when dealing with a developer?

Well basically with honest developers you're just being charged the cost of the developers time. This may be an hourly rate or an estimate based on the task at hand (estimate = how we do things). With unscrupulous developers, watch out! They'll inflate their prices and pour honey in your ear, and at the end of your ordeal with them, you'll feel like you got robbed...you did. Let me put forth some wisdom for you so that you don't have to gamble when dealing with developers, because its hard to know whether they are honest or just filling you with the words you want to hear. Go about your custom template development in this manner:

Template Wisdom in 5 Easy Steps

1. Try to find free Joomla templates: Start here. If you can't find anything that works for you, thats perfectly OK, 90% of the time you wont find a fit.
2. Try to find Professional Joomla templates: The next step is to check with pro template manufactures, the cost is around $50 USD for a template club subscription, or maybe a little cheaper if you find a pay-per-template group. Sixty percent of the time you'll find something you can settle on, and you may want to settle because the next three steps may seem too steep for your budget.
3. Find a free XHTML compliant template: Step three in your quest for the perfect Joomla template is to go outside the sphere of Joomla templates and find a free standards compliant template, and then have a Joomla template developer insert the PHP hooks and ready the CSS and XML for a Joomla installation. You can find these templates all over the web, but the quality is hit or miss (but much better than free Joomla templates). The key here, is for you to do the work and find the template. This will minimize the developers time. You can probably get this kind of a template built for you at around $200 USD.
4. Find a pay web template: you've seen these shops all over the web, the big one is monstertemplates.com. She's the mother of all pay templates on the web. $50 USD will get you a PSD and some crappy non-standards compliant code that Adobe Image Ready pumps out. The good thing is that they make great looking templates and chop them up for the developer. All the developer has to do is throw the images into the template and standardize the typography. The back breaker here is the CSS file, this take the most time. You really have to massage the CSS into Joomla, and then you have to become friends with the big dumb angry kid on the block, Internet Explorer and its dynasty of crummy browsers. Once again, your “doing the work”, minimizes the developers time. You should bring the developer one template at this stage. You'll then be looking at $350-500 USD, depending on the complexity of the template.
5. Lastly, the custom Joomla Template. You're just too picky, aren't you. We'll, its your website. Actually this is the best part of the website, the design. I would suggest to you, so that you can minimize expense, to bring to the developer at least three sites that you like. You can find these sites of course on the web, or better yet from the resources we've already listed above. Bring these ideas to the plate and tell the developer, I like this part of this website because... and be as clear as you possibly can. Write bullet points or whatever. Get across what you are looking for. Spend your time preparing for your developer. This will minimize your costs and it will also help wrap your mind around what you really want.

I'm going to stop it right here...dang I wrote much too much, and I barely scratched the surface...I hope this helped.

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