Are there any opportunities in designing (and selling) website themes that are fast-loading and accessible and written in plain html and css (not Wordpress, or a CSS framework)?<p>In another Ask HN on web design [1], posters say don't offer design services. But presumably, even when you're developing the backend, you need to reach for a front-end design or template - either free or for sale. The market for HTML/CSS themes is completely saturated though - is it fruitless to pursue this avenue?<p>[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18945658
Looks to me like the going price for static templates is $20-$50.<p><a href="https://themeforest.net/category/static-site-generators" rel="nofollow">https://themeforest.net/category/static-site-generators</a>
<a href="https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates" rel="nofollow">https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates</a>
<a href="https://jekyllthemes.io/premium" rel="nofollow">https://jekyllthemes.io/premium</a>
In my opinion, there is without doubt a market, but your main challenge is going to be marketing your themes.<p>In a professional context, paying $29 or $50 or even $up-to-a-couple-of-hundred for a base/starting theme is a no brainer _if_ it's good enough, and you're convinced it'll not be a nightmare to adopt/extend/maintain in the future.<p>That "convincing" bit is hard...<p>Like pickpuck points out, ThemeForest will be one of your major competitors, so you'll need to work out good answers to two fairly difficult questions:<p>1) How are you going to differentiate your themes from free or inexpensive ones from ThemeForest?<p>2) How are you going to compete on marketing - SEO/Word Of Mouth/developer "mindshare" against ThemeForest (and al the other longstanding well-SEO-ed theme suites in Google)?