I am a freelance web designer and have been for some 6 months now and for a while I was doing very well, boy there were some days when I was making upwards of $300 (£150) just from a couple of templates, but for the past month or so the only money I have been making is through web design and coding contracts rather than selling templates which were far easier to make money on.

I wanted to see whether it was simply the season or whether it was actually the way that the web design market was going, so I started up a thread on the DigitalPoint forum, which is the biggest webmaster forum for selling templates, web design contracts and the like. You can find the thread here: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=605524.

We came to the conclusion in this thread that because so many people were joining the web design industry and more particularly joining through DigitalPoint, that it had pushed down prices massively and now template buyers are put off by purchasing quality templates at the price that they are worth.

The problem is that the forum gets cluttered up with newbie designers selling crap templates for a couple of dollars whilst the top quality designs worth $100s end up down the pages where buyers don’t look, and then to make it even worse, the template doesn’t sell or you end up selling it for $20 or something ridiculous like that.

There were suggestions that the forum should split into sections for each type of template which I think is a great idea, the only problem with that of course is that the admins at the forum think that it is not busy enough, even though its very users (the people that hold that forum together) are loosing their income because of it.

There is hope for wordpress theme designers/coders because Matt at Wordpress will soon be launching a wordpress theme marketplace for users to sell their themes (more information in this podcast: click here), so that may improve the situation and bump up prices for unique themes and get rid of all the crappy themes off of DigitalPoint.

So in conclusion, web designers going broke on DigitalPoint and other forums such as TalkFreelance, is because newbie have a go designers are creating crappy templates and selling them for far less than any decent designer can go to. There needs to be a new place to sell templates that is exclusive to proper designers.

What are your thoughts on this: