By cookiesunshinex on

Hi,

I need to have a Drupal theme designed for a Drupal 5.14 site, and will eventually need that theme updated for Drupal 6 when we upgrade the site.

I'm curious about the pricing for Drupal theme. I got a quote from a developer (not on this site) for approximately $3000 USD.

This seems extremely high. The design does need to be more cutting edge design oriented - design (in other words, not a plain internet hosting company type website). However, that still sounds a bit high.

If there are any designers out there who specialize in Drupal theming out there, please PM me.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

michelle’s picture

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

For a "cutting edge design" that's actually fairly cheap. Good themes take time to do right. And time is money. :)

Michelle

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cookiesunshinex’s picture

cookiesunshinex commented

I forgot to mention that it's an entertainment website with target audience of 17-30.

I appreciate your comment Michelle, and I realize that there must be a wide range in price and quality.

Perhaps, I should investigate splitting the process of having the design done (graphics/screens) with having that design coded into a drupal theme.

lyricnz’s picture

lyricnz commented

Agree on the split - you'll probably find all the time/$ is in the design, rather than the implementation - which is reasonably straightforward.

stephthegeek’s picture

stephthegeek commented

An experienced theme developer with a strong toolkit can usually bang out the basics of any theme (general layout, regions, typography, body content styles, menus, etc) in anywhere from a few hours to a couple of days. But as they say, the devil's in the details!

It REALLY depends on:
- if there are things done in non-Drupally ways (are search results a funky layout? forms need breaking apart?)
- if there are a lot of unique touches (graphical buttons? custom task tabs? styled views filters?)
- how many unique layouts there are (do you have a home page, category landing pages, another layout for multimedia nodes, custom user profiles, another for static pages, plus a unique style for teaser listings?)
- how many uniquely styled blocks/regions/views there are (each one of those special blocks adds up)
- how many modules you're throwing into the mix

Those details can easily take days or weeks on top of the basics. Oh yeah, and then there's browser testing.

Intermediate/expert themers are likely going to start at $40-60/hr for independent contracting gigs, easily up to $100, and firms even higher. Most custom-theming-from-mockups jobs we do are in the 20-40 hour range. That first "theme shell" part is usually only a quarter or a third of that time, the rest is those dozen or two little details the client wants. So it's easy to have theming jobs in the thousands, and I'm just talking about theming an existing mockup here, not any graphic design.

Hope that helps... while I think it's not impossible to find cheap Drupal labour, you often (but certainly not always) get what you pay for. I find that inexpensive theme developers are usually lacking on the design sensibility side (while theme devs are often not designers, there are still a lot of design judgment calls to make along the way), the Drupal-savvy side (do they understand how to make a flexible, scalable theme that for Drupal, not just some sliced graphics and CSS), or the cross-browser side.

Going that route can make sense if you're on a tight budget, but it all depends on your definition of value and what your needs are. And hey, that's pretty much exactly why we started TopNotchThemes, to put another alternative out there for those who can't afford a $3000 theming job :)

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davidwebguy’s picture

davidwebguy commented

I'd say that $3k is a good quote for that if you're looking for an advanced theme that's 100% custom. You've got to figure that the designer will probably spend around 30-40 hours just designing it, then when the time comes to slice it up and turn it into a template you have to make sure that the theme actually works with all that "advanced" functionality. They'll have to do all this, and make sure that the theme is secure from vulnerabilities!

If you're looking at the designer/developer's portfolio and you see sites with custom designs, and the sites probably cost six figures to develop, then that's actually a very good bargain to only pay $3k for the design.

Drupal Development