CMS Made Simple Forums

Hi Guys,
What do you think the typical cost of a custom theme would run about?  Some like arthritis.org?

I'm not sure what variables I would need to give specifics. Can someone give me list of things a designer would need to give me a price? 

I think in time, I can learn all the other coding stuff but design, I doubt it.

Thank You

Gabby

First item is do you have a design already? If not the designer will need to know how many templates(layouts) you want (typically you have one for the homepage and one for internal pages, but you might want more for special sections like members-only or a forum). Also how many columns for each layout and how many different design elements. I am not a designer so there maybe other but those are the one I can think of.

If you do have the design, has it templated or made into a site? If so do you have access to the images/backgrounds?

Thank You Jeff,

Ok, yes and no. I have a design on my current site but it is copywritten to the host. So I would need a new design all together.

Right now, I have one main page and everything else using the same subpage, but I can change that anytime. I have a lot of text content so single column works. Can I add blocks to the side using CMS?

Can I buy a design from one of these templates shops and use it on CMS? If so, how hard would that be?  '

Thank you very much for you reply.

Gabby

The cheapest way is to find a theme/template on a free template site like http://www.freelayouts.com/websites/html-templates

A google search will provide others: http://www.google.com/search?q=free+htm ... +templates

Then here is a video on how use a free template in CMSms. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0g9WkCwO7s

There are also some nice ones in the theme site that can be adapted to your look...

http://themes.cmsmadesimple.org/

I'm coming kind of late to this party, but it's very easy to port any design or them to CMSMS. The previous poster's link to the Chocolate Mint tutorial is an example of that.

This site, in addition to having some basic CMSMS tutorials, also has a small selection of really nice themes:
http://www.icms.info/cmsms-templates

Since we offer full services, graphic design AND web development, we don't have to go hunting around for themes or commission a graphic artist to do so. My business partner is our resident graphic artist. So in that way, I'm spoiled.

When I design for CMSMS (or any CMS for that matter), it depends on what features (plugins, modules) the client wants what the end price will be. Even if you decide to use a premade theme, you still have to account for the display of client-desired pages such as photo galleries, contact pages, etc. (Those are the big ones.) So once you get from your client the feature list, you'll need to factor styling additional modules into your quote. And of course make sure you can find a module that will do what they need. And a lot of things just take extra time to accomplish, setting up and configuring members only content or a shopping cart, etc.

And as for arranging content, you can pull any content you want into a sidebar. I generally use Global Content Blocks for sidebar code snippets. And then pull those into various other "sidebar" GCBs. So that if I have global content blocks called "social-media," "newsbox," "linklist," and maybe I want the newsbox on only the home page template, I'll create another GBC called sidebar-home and dump what I want in there and call the sidebar-home GCB on the home page template, and then create another sidebar GCB called "sidebar" and put everything in there that I want (except news, which in my example, I DO NOT want on any page except home -- just for illustration you understand). That way, you don't have to edit things like that in more than one place. Make sense?

Oh, one more thing, Gabby. Be really careful where you get some of those templates from. Some are flash-based and are dreadful. Others are horribly constructed. All kinds of folks, with all kinds of skillsets, are out there churning out templates. Make sure you can preview a prospective theme. Use Firefox to be sure the theme validates as to HTML and CSS. If it doesn't, I'd look elsewhere. It's precisely because you may not know enough about CSS or HTML to fix it yourself that you need it to be correct right out of the box. Plus it makes working on it later much easier.