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His price of 449 pounds is extremely reasonable. I suspect that it will be a relatively short lived offer, as Chris learns just how much work it actually takes to produce these templates (hint: design and coding only takes up half of the total time; dealing with clients, answering email and phone, and generally running a business eats up the rest).

I’ve written a post about pricing here: http://www.theblogstudio.com/index.php?/blog/comments/blog_design_and_web_design_pricing/ Pricing of design in general is a contentious issue. It seems particularly so with bloggers (especially probloggers). Speaking from experience, this seems odd; we’ve demonstrated time and again that top notch design actually improves the bottom line for probloggers.

I would say his price is a bit steep, but then again you pay for quality, and his templates look good quality.

If you are looking for a blog design have a look at some competition before signing up for the 449 deal. My hyperlink is above :)

Don’t want to pay? Here are your options.

1. Get a free template/theme and try to customize it yourself. Beleive me, I’ve been doing html and web design for 10+ years now and it’s not as easy as it looks.

2. Get a template from templatemonster.com. But be warned, they are pretty, but require a TON of customization and fixes once you get them.

I would reommend Chris’s service to anyone who wants to do it right, without hassle. That’s the true value in my eyes. Professional, beautiful, customizable to my brand, and hassle free. Just start blogging.

I’m SO VERY done with those so called blog designers I’ve encountered. I wonder if these two words “work ethic” and “delivery” are in their vocabulary.

Of course not everyone sees the value in a custom design. Nor does everyone need one with all the free themes out there. But with a company, one who is serious about their business, I always advise going for custom rather than off the shelf.

I’m sure Darren has two well designed blogs for a reason. The one here at ProBlogger and his new photography blog –>> http://digital-photography-school.com/blog/

In my opinion, going that extra mile does pay off.

Two other design companies creating blogs that I admire are:

Moxi Design Studios (they are usually booked up) http://www.moxiedesignstudios.com/index.php/xmas/blog/

And the Blog Studio http://www.theblogstudio.com/

cat

I had problems looking for a wordpress designer so I ended up learning CSS and doing the design myself for my blogs. So far so good. I help friends design their own blogs now.

If you plan to tweak your own blog, I suggest that you pick a good wordpress template (there are tons of Wordpress templates) and study the CSS part of it. You will eventually get the drift after a week or so. I picked the Ads-Minded template by sapiensbryan.com and studied the whole thing since he makes very detailed, clean and organized codes.

If you don’t want to go through this, you can always hire a blog designer to design some custom templates for you.

That money’s a helluva lot easier to make than using contextual ads and one leads to another and to another and …..

Hey Chris – I wasn’t dissing you or the idea, I’m just trying to get people to see that if they’ll take their topic and dig it deeper and narrower, it’ll work better than if you go wide and shallow. That’s how they drill oil wells – narrow and deep ! Oil wells = money !

The two remarks after mine were EXACTLY what I had expected from bloggers. Just wanted to keep them from making you sorry that you were doing what you were doing.

You are to be commended for actually taking action, rather than potshots.

The wish you luck remark was because I already know how cheap and half-ass a lot of bloggers are.

Congrats ! And feel free to holler if you’d like to expand upon what I was talking about.

But for people who see their blogs as a business (or part of their business) in the traditional sense, I think the price is very reasonable.

I think you’ve got a good point. Bloggers probably wouldn’t be the best audience. A blogger who is motivated enough to start their own blog seriously are probably going to be resourceful enough to find a free design that works for them or be able to tweak one to their taste.

But what about the local businesses who haven’t found blogging yet. There are a lot of businesses who aren’t as technically savvy and wouldn’t mind putting this task on someone else’s shoulders. A local clothes retailer might wonder what it takes to start a product blog. A small staffing firm might use a blog for recruitment. These kinds of people wouldn’t necessarily have the internal resources to get a blog going.

http://logopond.com/gallery/detail/518

Mike, I don’t just focus on blog design, I’m actually doing alot of design work for web applications at the moment, I just felt it was an area that I needed to make more of a fuss about really.