Templates, templates, templates
By Joe on Wednesday, August 15 2007, 10:22 - Design corner - Permalink
Fancy building some templates?
Howdy. Our design team have been working on a few new design templates to spruce things up a bit for the end of the summer (what summer?). And while we were doing it, we thought a bit about how we could open up template creation to you the customers, so that you can contribute to the media set available within SiteMaker. Sound interesting?
The long term plan would be to create a kind of template/widget marketplace where people could trade, buy and sell templates and other media (I stress long term - this will take a while). But in the short term, we thought we could publish a set of guidelines for how to build templates using SiteMaker, and accept submissions from people if they wanted to contribute something. We'd credit you with the template creation and pay a flat fee of £100 GBP ($200 USD) for each template.
Does this sound like something you'd like to do?
Comments
Interesting.
Whilst we are on the subject of improvements do you think you might look at these two areas :
- Giving us the option to have rounded edged on text boxes.
- Improving the forms in terms of look and feel options and very importantly introducing drop downs.
Here's hoping. Thanks
Justin
Hey guys, this sounds like a fantastic idea, love it, im looking forward to it already!
S
This sounds like an excellent idea, this is something i would do.
Scott
Great idea
Hang on! your giving us £100 to spend on templates! If yes, then cool cause no one ever gets anything for free!
Hey Joe,
When do you think you will have the guidelines ready for us.
Just wondering
Scott
Hi Criptor9, I'm afraid we're not giving you money for nothing! If you build a template using SiteMaker and sell it to us, we'll give you £100 GBP ($200 USD). So you do have to work for it ;-)
Hi Scott, we're working on the guidelines now, we'll be able to get them out in the next few days. Thanks,
Joe
£100 is alot for a template. I'm finding it hard to believe. I'm sure alot of people will take up this offer but how can you pay them all? Is this going to be like a monthly competition thing? How does Moonfruit decide which template is better than the other? Sounds like a very good idea though... ;)
Hi Phil, we'll only offer to buy the ones that are really good, so not all templates will be bought. We'll try to pick templates that meet a range of different design needs. If they're all the same it will be a bit boring! We'll have to see how it goes with supply and demand, but it could be something we run over a number of months to keep things fresh.
Joe
Hi Joe,
Does the templates have to be built with moonfruit tools or can we use external programs such as flash & photoshop. I reckon this will be explained in the guidelines but i have alot of templates i have designed for various clients which i hold the rights too.
Scott
Hi Scott, yes it will be in the guidelines, but roughly speaking, the simple answer is that you have to use SiteMaker, and only files that are in the SiteMaker media Library, as when a site is used as a template, these files will need to be available to that site, e.g. not in their uploaded space.
Now in theory if you wanted to use files that you've built, you could do that, but we'd have to add them to our media library so that there were universally available. This would mean that other people could pick them for their sites too. We also need to be 100% sure that you have the rights to use these files (e.g. you built them), and that you extend the rights to us to use them in templates.
So it's a bit more complicated (both technically and legally), but not impossibe. Thanks,
Joe
Deffo be entering! Thanks for creating the competition!
PS - Just wondering, would it ever be possible to have seperate comment boxes and RSS features for the news blogs,and a feature where you can add videos to them?
Hi Scott we are indeed working on the RSS Video Feature which will be available with in the next few months.
Hi Joe,
Will you publish the guidelines on the lounge or on the moonfruit site. by the way when will the guidelines be published.
Scott
Can u get more music style templates that would be great,and maybe mp3 players that u can rate the tracks,that would make my day
Hi Scott, we'll publish them here in the next few days, thanks, Joe
THis is going to create some great design I hope, good luck to all those who are going to jump in.
Jeff
I thought I saw one new template in the mix already? nebula or something. It looks very good !!
Please someone when will there be others ?
We added 6 new templates in the last release - ones we had designed our selves. The next release (in a couple of weeks) we will be releasing some more graphic fonts and the following release, we'll be adding some new media which will include a few more templates and some additional images. As for the user-supplied templates, we have had a few submissions, most of which we have responded to and some which showed great promise. This will be, for the moment, an ongoing task.