With nearly two decades under my belt of website designs, there is
one thing that I have seen come up over and over and over again.
In today's episode, we are going to be talking about how
to have a successful template shop as part of your
web design business. The upper end of the scale is the two and a
half thousand pounds plus.
Hey, I'm Holly, I'm from Websites Made simple and I am
here to help you have a successful website design
career without making all the mistakes I did along the way.
If you're just joining us for the first time, thank you so much for being
here. It is lovely to meet you. If you've been here for a few episodes,
thank you for coming back. Today. I am talking about
the biggie, the template shops, because
with nearly two decades under my belt of website designs, there is
one thing that I have seen come up over and over and over again
and that website designers create template
shops for people to be able to come and buy the
websites and, you know, set them up themselves and
they go to all the work of creating the templates
and then they end up kind of ripping their hair out because
they're not getting anyone who's buying it or, you know, it's just not
the success that they want it to be. Now, as someone who has
a very successful template side of
my web design business, known as simply Size, I am here
to tell you how I did it. But also
what would be a good framework for you to work out how to do it
for you too? The very first thing I want to start with is
considering what you want the client experience
to be. And by saying this, I
mean, obviously we all want our clients to say, yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, I really
loved it. We had a great time. Let's say that that's a given.
What do you want your clients to do? Do you want them just to
buy a template, buy the framework and go off and populate it
themselves? Do you want to run a support group where
they are touching base and you know they're asking you any questions and
they're being supported and helped by a community, or is it
something else that you want to be able to offer
but is working with the framework now? When I set up Simply Size,
I wanted to be able to create budget websites for people and really
I wanted to tap into a slightly different market as well. And this is where
the template shops tend to sit are
usually the people who aren't budgeting for a custom build website,
but they still want a professional web presence. When I did
It I thought, I don't want to create a template and send people
on their way. I want them to feel like they're having a really good experience,
but at a budget price. I need to find a way that
I can make this work for everybody. My experience was that
I created templates for people to choose from. And
at the time I started, I launched with five templates. Choose your template
and after that you'll get a scaled down version of my
custom build service. So we'll have a 45 minute branding and
content planning call. I will build the website out to the first
draft. You'll generally know what it's going to look like because you've chosen the
framework for it. Then I will show you the first draft,
you get to suggest any amends and then we go live with it. Following
that, you have a website user manual and you get to do that for
yourselves. That's been a really successful experience
for me because I really handheld my clients with
their website builds. They get all of that kind of reassurance and all of
the good side of the web design with a professional site, but
at a budget cost. That might not be the model for you. You might
think, I just want to be one and done. I just want to have fun
creating the stuff, but I don't really want to populate it. So
really think about who your ideal client is going to be
before you get designing. Because first of all that will
influence not only the style of design
that you create, but it will influence kind of who
you're designing designing it for as well. Because if you want
to create something where your clients are going to populate those
templates themselves, then the website structures are going to have
to be pretty simple and you're not going to necessarily be able to get any
of the fancy animation or anything like that in there that you could
do. If you're the one who's populating it, that's the first thing
is who are you trying to draw in with this experience?
When I created simplisites, I wanted people who were at the
beginning stage of their website journey. So whether they had a shop,
whether they had a service led business. I knew that in three
years time after their simplisite had been built, I wanted them to
come back to me, but this time for a custom build website. So my custom
build clients were further along in the journey. They were people who'd already had a
website. They were looking to step into a bigger, better,
bolder website that was all about them.
Those type of clients, the Custom build clients, they're not going to be interested
in template shops. When we look at the kind of
person who is going to be looking at having a template website,
they fall into two categories. You fall into the
DIYers who are looking for something really inexpensive,
you know, 250 to 450 pounds. And they are
the ones who are most likely to be willing and
prepared to populate the content themselves. In which case, if
you're going to create that, you're going to have to look at a simple
framework, you're going to have to look at what kind of support you want to
give following that. I mean, back in the day people used to
do that using Facebook groups. Then do you want to have video
tutorials? Do you want to have written tutorials? I have like a
Vimeo channel that people can go on, but they also do get a website
manual. But as I say, I populate the content as well.
So I kind of have all of my bases covered here. Then you
have the other side of it where people are,
I'm going to call them like the semi custom build people
because they want a bigger, better website
and they're not fussed about it being a custom build. They're happy to
work with a template, but they want it to really feel like it
represents them. You'd be using a template and whether that's one
that you've created yourself or you're grabbing
something from the hundreds and hundreds of thousands
of templates available, but you're the one who's putting in the work, you're the
one who's populating the content for them and showing it as
this is something that's going to end up in your portfolio as well. And
those people are at a different price point. Those would usually
start round about the 2,500 pounds mark, going up
to whatever it is you charge for that. It can all depend really on
how big the website is and what kind of stuff that you're going to do
there. That is the first thing. Look who your
ideal client for this service will be. And
that will help you to map out what the price
point of what you're going to offer is going to be and then what
you're going to be working with. Are you going to be creating something, as
I say, something that pretty locked down into a child theme that you're just
sending out. It could be some people use the same framework and
just change the colors and the people get, you know, the pink website or the
green website or the yellow website or whatever Else some people make it
more sophisticated than that. My
personal thing is that I always want someone to
feel whether they've got one of my sympathy sites or whether they've got one of
my custom builds, I always want them to feel like it's
absolutely made for them, fits them like a glove. So I
don't do templates around colors. You know, we always, always work with a
client's as well there.
The next thing to look at is how
will you support them in getting the content that you
need? Or they need to be able to build out this website because
content is where people get really, really stuck,
particularly the copywriting stage. If they're also
going for a lower price website, it could be that they
haven't had a photo shoot done, that they don't have a brand or brand
guidelines. It might be. The most successful
way of getting these template shops off the ground is to offer
some support with that as well. A lot of web designers also offer
logo shops and what you can look at as well is
pairing the logo shop with certain websites as
well. So if you've got your template shop there and you can have an
upsell on the logos or the brand kits that go there as well and that
can work really well because people often feel quite
confident when they are buying everything from one place as
well. So do consider that if logos are something that you do,
you could get a copywriter on board. I have a copywriter
who I work with on my simply site, Natalie. She is
fantastic and she actually writes the
website to the template as well. So when I
recommend someone, you know, they come and choose their simply site
and they get put in touch with Natalie if they want support with their copy
and Natalie writes it to the simply site they're buying. So it makes it really,
really easy to build out this website as well.
If a client is going to write their own website
copy, how are you going to support
them within doing that? Because there's a couple of things.
First of all, copywriting, as you will know, is a
skill within itself and it's a skill that most of
our clients don't have and they don't realize that
until it gets to the point where they bought the website and they need to
create the copy and then it just goes on a go
slow or they just don't get round to it because they have that rabbit in
the headlights feel about it. I have
a client onboarding pack that I use for my simply site.
I actually have it available for web designers to buy as well.
Goes really well with The Web Designers contract pack. But the onboarding pack
is the onboarding process and it has a whole workbook
for people for how to recognize their ideal client, how to write
website copy for them, and it has other information about branding and
images and stuff. It's like this really robust pack. It also has
a technical information sheet where it goes through, do
you have a domain, where's it registered, with login details, everything that you need
to be able to get this website hooked up as well. Because when
people buy a website and they buy a domain, they often
don't consider what they need to do to connect one to the other. And I'm
sure you've come across this a lot. The onboarding pack
also has an entire website content
document which the clients write their content into.
It's a fillable PDF and it has, you know,
here, homepage, section one, section two, service one, service
two, a spreadsheet for shops as well. If you are going
to build shops for people or have template for
shops, you might like to set a number on
the amount of products you're going to upload for them. Because trust
me, you can fall into the trap where someone says, oh yeah,
yeah, I'll send it over and you look and there's like a thousand products,
there are hundreds of products and you can't just upload it through a CSV
import or something like that. So do consider what your boundaries
and what your limits are here. For me, mine is 20. I will
upload 20 items to a shop and then I will show them how to do
it themselves. But I've always found that 20 is quite a
good number for the amount of categories and things
like that that are available. Particularly because when people are coming for
these sites, smaller templates, they're on a budget, they don't have as many
products there as well. Likewise, we can say 20 with blog
posts if you're uploading blogs, something like that. But do consider that, because
it really can be a bit of an eye opener with that
one as well.
We've spoken so far about the type of template shop
you're going to have, who it's going to be for, who it's going to appeal
to now, how you can support them
in getting the content as well. And as I say, my experience has been
that the more that I support people with the content, the
happier my clients are. But the more projects actually get off the
ground and the more websites that get bought and the more websites get
built and get launched, and it all works really well as well.
So if you're not sure about how to get content from the client or
how to get content easily. You might like to look at the website in its
onboarding pack and it's available from the Websites Made simple
website, which is websitesmadesimple.co.uk.
once you've supported them with the content, they need
to have a think about what you want to do around the aftercare as
well. So as I say, if you're looking at that very low budget
and it's just a case of here's the website files, here's how you
upload it, off you go, then you're probably not really going to
have very much of an aftercare package. But
Aftercare is a something that's really
useful for people because even in these days people can still
be really nervous about website tech as well. So knowing that you
are available for support for a month, some offer it for
three months. I personally have website hosting
and maintenance plans as well and I would say 90% of
my clients choose that option. They're a little bit reduced in price
to the custom builds as well. And that usually reflects the fact that there are
less plugins and less technicalities on the website as well.
But it means that they pay monthly, it's on a direct debit.
And then we have. I actually have my tech guy, Stu does all of the
maintenance, we offer it as a monthly thing, but he does all the maintenance weekly
on the websites. And people know that as well because he'll test the contact
forms, he'll test shopping baskets, he'll drop them an email and say that he's done
this as well. But it is a really good
trust building exercise because sometimes when we offer
templates and we just say, you know, here we go, people
don't have a great experience with it. But when we offer that all round
service, people do have a really good experience and they
recommend it to their friends. And I get quite a lot of work through referrals
on both my custom Build and my SimPlay site. I
get a lot more referrals from the Simplii sites because there
are a lot more people in the market at the price that simply
sites are priced at. And because it's a quick turnaround,
we've got more people going through the system faster and that's also more people
on the hosting and maintenance plan as well. And so it means
that the website hosting maintenance makes up a good
portion of our income of the company's income as well. So do
consider that templates can feel
like an easy solution Particularly when web designers are
struggling with income, they fill all sorts of
gaps, don't they? Because you want to be designing, you want to be having
fun and designing is fun. You get to kind of tick all
of those boxes and you get that fast turnover as well.
The next thing I would say is look at how much you're going to charge
for it. And as said, the kind of bottom end of the scale is the
200, 250 pound template for people who are going
to DIY the project. And then the upper end of the scale
is the two and a half thousand pounds plus for people who
are offering a template option or going to buy a template, but they're
going to populate it themselves as well. And then there's everything at
every price point in between. And trust me, I have seen
every price point in between as well. You can make really money out
of template websites, and I probably don't need to tell you that, but if you're
listening to this podcast, the chances are you probably aren't
making the money that you want to make out of template websites.
If you're having someone who is
wanting something that's very, very easy and
feels a little bit kind of intuitive, you
might like to use something like wix. If you want to focus
on shops, have a look at Shopify. You probably know
I am a WordPress website developer and designer as well.
I do all of my template stuff in WordPress as well. I use
the same software each time, so it means that all of my training videos,
all of my website user manuals are created using the same
software. So it also means that I have been able to
standardize all of my website manuals because I've been able
to say, this is how you change an image, this is how you add a
blog posts, this is how you add something to the navigation, this is how you
change text, this is how you use titles and you name it, we've got video
for it. I've also got this on my Vimeo support channel as well.
So there's lots and lots of stuff that we have available there.
And if you feel like you're chopping and changing between
software, you might feel that you start to run yourself
ragged with the client support there as well. So I definitely say
choose one thing to start with and get really good at that one thing
as well. And remember, with template shops, you still
need contracts. Even if it's just someone buying something from you
and then taking it off, you're still going to need the paperwork as
well. So it's really where the client onboarding pack
comes in and sits hand in hand with the web designers contract pack because the
contract pack also has things like hosting agreements.
It has the maintenance agreements as well. It has what we're liable for what
we're not liable for. One of the things that I have
is that if people are hosting their website with me we are not
liable for what they may go on to put on their website
or what they might have going through their email accounts. If
we see something that breaches our
moral code or something like that we are allowed to remove it from our
servers as well. So if you have a template shop or you're
thinking of setting up a template shop, I hope you have found this
episode useful. Do write in and let me know as well. You can
find me at
hellobsitemadesimple.co.uk, i would
love to hear from you. I would love to hear your experience with the
template shops as well. And until next time Happy
web designing.