By vanguyafo on

I noticed that it's very hard to hire a Drupal Themer, anyone else have experienced that? What can the community do to ensure that there're enough Drupal Themers and Developers so that Drupal can continue to grow and succeed.

Comments

sew’s picture

sew commented

There are lots of development companies that are happy to sell you a "website" (which includes Drupal installation, a few installed modules, a custom design, a theme, and maybe a couple of views), but no one wants to sell you a simple template. If you do your own design and just want a template, you're still talking a few thousand USD, assuming you can find anyone to do it.

I hate to bring up the competition, but if you go with Joomla there are tons of third-party sites that make nice templates and sell them for $40 or less (Joomlashack.com, for instance). There's a huge gap in the Drupal market between "free" and "$3000 USD". The typical small to medium sized business wants something slightly more unique than the free themes, but doesn't have the money for custom development or an in-house dev team. It's a shame.

Just for the record -- my company still decided it was worth it to pay for a custom Drupal theme. Joomla's codebase is a steaming pile of poo and all the cheap templates in the world won't make up for it. I just wish the gap in the Drupal market was a little smaller.

Any entrepreneurs who are good at CSS might hear opportunity knocking right now.... ;)

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

If their license allows it, buy a Joomla one you like and convert it. It's not super hard to convert a theme and you can hire a coder for that if you want for probably a lot cheaper than a designer to design a new one.

As to getting more designers to Drupal, I don't know. I think there's a market here... I have no idea why it's not being acted upon more. Maybe it's that we're too used to pre-made themes being free? I know modules you have to pay for can upset people (maybe upset isn't the right word but it's 4am and I'm a little muddled) as the community is used to the whole pay for service and custom code not pre-made stuff. Maybe it's the same for themes? I don't know. I haven't heard of any company trying and failing at selling Drupal themes, but maybe there has been.

I think if a company had a slew of cheap themes perhaps coupled with an offer of minimal customizing for a low rate they'd do good. But that's just my opinion.

Michelle

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My site: http://shellmultimedia.com