Who Are The Best vB Designers

[MRGTB]

Originally Posted by CAMS

correction he "buys" decent skins and then resells them.. i speak to the person whos sold alot of his work to that site.




yeah i tryed that... started to sell styles for ?10 a pop... but relised it wasnt picking up and had more pms,emails asking for custom work instead.. so now i just do custom styles and thers not a day goes by that someone doesnt email/pm me asking for info on it or wanting a quote..

so am guesing more peeps want custom styles only they will have than a style thats resold.

I'm quite suprised that you wasn't shifting skins at ?10 pop. Did you have quite a large selection of skins to choose from at that price. Or just the odd 2 or 4 to choose from? I'm wondering how large your list of skins was for ?10?

As I would have though if you'd build up a pretty large collection of cheap skins for fast turn over, maybe 40-50. You should have done quite well on sales.

[smacklan]

It just depends on what you want to do and how you want to go about it. My experience is there is a good market for both. Whatever you do as a business, you have to be prepared to provide support after the sale...that is the key to success.

[MRGTB]

Originally Posted by smacklan

It just depends on what you want to do and how you want to go about it. My experience is there is a good market for both. Whatever you do as a business, you have to be prepared to provide support after the sale...that is the key to success.

But I see that your site is selling two skins that vBCore are advertising they created called ATX and 360 for you site. So would I be right in saying that some skins your selling you did not create though?

And your doing like other site, selling skins created by other people like vBCore were you buy the rights to re-sell them.

EDIT:

Sorry I take that back. The ATX skin is being sold both on your site and vBCore

[smacklan]

I bought full rights from vbcore to several designs. He doesn't own rights to them to sell them any longer. You would be correct in your assumption. I am like several of the large skin sites in that I employ designers and coders to come up with my products. There are plenty of freelancers and custom skin makers and they fill a good market need and persue what they enjoy I suspect. The large resell skin sites like mine are a business, approaching the market differently than custom designers.

[DirectPixel]

Originally Posted by Gary Bolton

There are a lot of sites constantly setting up with the intentions of making money from vB Styles. How many of them are actually successfull overall in selling there skins on a regular bases I'd be interested to know (apart from the obvious well known skin sites that produce top quality styles thats been around for ages). As it quite obvious there selling them OK.

But I agree, even I thought about jumping on the band wagon so to speak at one point after reading people saying they will pay $300 and $600 for a skin LOL. Hell why not, I'm all for making money which every way it comes!

But I don't really have the time to sit there all day creating skins and then having to provide a backup service well, which they would expect at $300 a pop. And skins do usually mess up sometimes when a new vB version is released. Plus you get FREE skins released here all the time, so your work I would image would have to be of a very high quality to temp people to buy them, when they can come here and get free ones.

I hope I'm not being too abrupt by jumping in here. Just thought I'd like to share my experiences with vBulletin skins.

First off, thanks to Chris M. for listing me first.

Anyways, in the long run, from my experience, providing per-client custom solutions has generated far more income than pre-made skin sales. With that said, the work-to-money-earned ratio for pre-made skin sales is very nice and is a great source of (relatively) passive income.

I've tested the waters with selling made-for-mass-consumption styles a few times with a few skins over the past two years. It seems to me that while it may be lots of fun waking up to a hundred PayPal payments in your bank, it becomes extremely hectic once Jelsoft updates vBulletin and you try to update a dozen styles within a couple of hours.

In addition, providing support for non-custom skins is a major pain. There is always the 10-year-old kid who somehow came up with the money for a vBulletin license and demands support for every little template tweak and nags on you 24/7 to change an element of the skin or add a feature that he wants.

Designing custom skins, on the other hand, is not only great fun, but also becomes more profitable than reselling skins, in the long run. Contrary to smacklan's post, I will heartily disagree about the business potential of doing custom work. Providing custom forum skins is not too different from designing a custom website. I've worked with many clients who needed not only a custom vBulletin skin, but also server setups, backend-programming, and even database administration. Contrary to what's been mentioned by just about everyone in this thread, there are companies that are more than willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on their websites. In my experience, working with companies on a one-to-one basis provides more income with a faster turnaround time than simply selling pre-made skins to mostly individuals and small companies.

[amykhar]

There is always the 10-year-old kid who somehow came up with the money for a vBulletin license and demands support for every little template tweak and nags on you 24/7 to change an element of the skin or add a feature that he wants.

You get that with free mods too, which is what makes me cranky

[smacklan]

Originally Posted by DirectPixel

Designing custom skins, on the other hand, is not only great fun, but also becomes more profitable than reselling skins, in the long run. Contrary to smacklan's post, I will heartily disagree about the business potential of doing custom work. Providing custom forum skins is not too different from designing a custom website. I've worked with many clients who needed not only a custom vBulletin skin, but also server setups, backend-programming, and even database administration. Contrary to what's been mentioned by just about everyone in this thread, there are companies that are more than willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on their websites. In my experience, working with companies on a one-to-one basis provides more income with a faster turnaround time than simply selling pre-made skins to mostly individuals and small companies.

You make some good points. There is good money to be made in both markets and there is also good residual income to the pre-made market. Alot of whats making me successful are the little things I provide to my clients that invaribly leads to more work and is a great source of satisfaction for me...it's not just about selling you a skin for me and many of my clients will attest to that.

Not all pre-made skin sites operate that way. Just as not all custom designers do either. One disadvantage custom designers have is they have a larger pool of competition as do they (sometimes) have a harder time proving a reputation for support.

I would venture to guess, that most freelance designers aren't going to have the 5 figure opportunities you have, nor the skills to follow through on those opportunities if they present themselves.

[MRGTB]

Originally Posted by DirectPixel

I hope I'm not being too abrupt by jumping in here. Just thought I'd like to share my experiences with vBulletin skins.

First off, thanks to Chris M. for listing me first.

Anyways, in the long run, from my experience, providing per-client custom solutions has generated far more income than pre-made skin sales. With that said, the work-to-money-earned ratio for pre-made skin sales is very nice and is a great source of (relatively) passive income.

I've tested the waters with selling made-for-mass-consumption styles a few times with a few skins over the past two years. It seems to me that while it may be lots of fun waking up to a hundred PayPal payments in your bank, it becomes extremely hectic once Jelsoft updates vBulletin and you try to update a dozen styles within a couple of hours.

In addition, providing support for non-custom skins is a major pain. There is always the 10-year-old kid who somehow came up with the money for a vBulletin license and demands support for every little template tweak and nags on you 24/7 to change an element of the skin or add a feature that he wants.

Designing custom skins, on the other hand, is not only great fun, but also becomes more profitable than reselling skins, in the long run. Contrary to smacklan's post, I will heartily disagree about the business potential of doing custom work. Providing custom forum skins is not too different from designing a custom website. I've worked with many clients who needed not only a custom vBulletin skin, but also server setups, backend-programming, and even database administration. Contrary to what's been mentioned by just about everyone in this thread, there are companies that are more than willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars on their websites. In my experience, working with companies on a one-to-one basis provides more income with a faster turnaround time than simply selling pre-made skins to mostly individuals and small companies.

So like Smacklan, you agree the money to be made is in custom work, rather than mass-made-skins which are sold over and over to everybody. But on saying that, do you still make a nice earner out of mass made skins though?

[DirectPixel]

Originally Posted by Gary Bolton

So like Smacklan, you agree the money to be made is in custom work, rather than mass-made-skins which are sold over and over to everybody. But on saying that, do you still make a nice earner out of mass made skins though?

I've stopped selling pre-made skins publicly.

[Princeton]

I would venture to guess, that most freelance designers aren't going to have the 5 figure opportunities you have, nor the skills to follow through on those opportunities if they present themselves.

you may be surprised at how many of us do "fit" in this category

there are many advantages/disadvantages on both sides -- the key is to find a company that will be around for the long haul

TIP WHEN BUYING SKINS:
1)__ Do not buy or use skins that contains deprecated code. ie. <font> :down:
2)__ Do not buy or use skins that do not validate XHTML. (validate code at http://validator.w3.org/)
3)__ Purchasing a custom skin will make your site stand out. Paying upwards of $1000 is not uncommon.

NOTE:
- Skins with deprecated code are usually bloated with unneccessary code.
- Skins that do not validate is a sign that "designer" does not know what they are doing OR a sign that "designer" is in it for the quick buck.
- 9 out of 10 skins that do not validate will usually give you problems down the road.