Open Realty Commercial Templates

Posted on July 25, 2007
Filed Under Real Estate News |

The difference between commercial and entry level Open Realty Templates

For the longest time I’ve noticed how frequently people still download the same old designs from my old file location and it amazes me at how often the designs get used. In the past 4 years I’ve been designing Open Realty templates following the same pattern as every other in the past until recently. Designs shift from year to year in features, color schemes and even general layout for the most part. I slap myself for not following this higher standard of design for Open Realty as I should have been.

A major role in a designers final result has a great deal to do with MONEY. Now I may get emails pointing out how presumptuous or outright wrong I am about that but I’m operating from a perspective of a freelance designer. PRICE DOES EFFECT QUALITY! The difference between an entry level $150 design and a commercial grade $1,200 design is light years apart. The time and energy spent, the quality, the detail and all the layout features are generally exponentially better. Granted there are the unethical bunch that charge $1,200 to an un suspecting client for a $100 design which is tragic and worthy of revealing something about this later.

Lets me ask you a question! Who do you think Open Realty is used by for the most part? How about this one; Are Open Realty users (those that download it and install it) professional Realtors? Well I’ve asked those questions many times over the years and generally what I notice is that most users are people building sites for Realtors and Open Realty fits the bill quite well for features and easy of management.

Many designers bid on jobs hoping the low bid will win not thinking about how little motive there is in $150 to do a great job. A good job should always be done regardless or you simply don’t bid, right? Well, I noticed that a few years ago and I decided to solve that messy business of bidding against the low dollar designers. What I did was created a core foundation of super high quality template sets that could be easily modified to deliver HIGH QUALITY at prices just above dirt cheap. The presence of that very mentality among designers keeps the industry jam packed with hacks and toss through designs that end up doing more harm than good to the end user, the visitors of your sites. Where am I going with this? Stay tuned because I’m going to articulate something about commercial and entry level design in a way that may shock you as much as it did me.

What to expect in a commercial Open Realty Design

Well here is a short list of things I always include in my designs without revealing my competitive inventory of features.

If you pay more than chicken scratch for a design you should at least expect the following elements and design features;

  • The Master Design PSD
  • A zip file of all working files
  • Favicon
  • Realtor Image Masters
  • Custom Error Pages (or logical ways of handling such)
  • Customized HTACCESS to handle canonical URL’s among other things
  • Compliant and validating template and CSS
  • Error free javascript (so often overlooked)
  • blank index.php or index.html file in all open folders (htaccess can handle this too)
  • Commercial or at least royalty free images (not google image search stolen ones)
  • Professional Web Site Style Guide
  • User Guide if a complex design (all my commercial designs now have this)
  • SEF and SEO features are a MUST
  • A CRON backup utility (many free ones so there is no excuse for not adding it)

You see, the difference is in the details and if at least part of that short list isn’t present in your design then you just purchased an entry level template and I certainly hope you didn’t pay for commercial.

Cost of Open Realty Templates - Unethical Designers and Unethical Pricing

Everything I wrote above I wrote because I received an email this morning from a woman that was so pissed off she paid $2,000 for one of my free templates (which had been modified), that she had the audacity to ask me for a partial refund. The problem is, I didn’t sell it to her. I quickly pointed out that I released about a dozen free templates and I have no control over who uses them or what they use them for. That includes people who take them, modify them, and sell them for $2,000.

Now I’ve witnessed this only a half dozen or so times in the past 7 years, but what always amazes me is the fact that the designer always gets found out and someone points out that the design is either jacked, copied or from a template club of sorts. I’ve seen where clients of mine come to me full of pride that they have paid as much as $2,000 for a design they were told was exclusive to them only to later discover the designer purchased it from Template Monster for $65 and changed a few files. What do I say to these people that will make a difference? “Umm sir, I’m sorry, but that design you asked me to turn into a Joomla template is worth about $65; thankfully my work is 10% of what you paid for it.” Well maybe I just don’t say anything because after bad news like that maybe they will change their mind about the $200 for the conversion. Shaking my head laughing; it’s a tragic event that nails everyone in that case.

Look, in the art world a guy can sneeze on a painting and raise the value tens of thousands of dollars simply because his status is such that all his work is considered a masterpiece (filled with snot or not). In the world we are forced to live in, reality isn’t as eccentric, that simply doesn’t happen ethically in the web design business. Taking a free template or $65 template and selling it for $2,000 isn’t a smart business idea its fraud in the first degree, period!

Open Realty Template Monster Templates - It’s a matter of trust

Now onto a side note about templates that are commercialized and not commercial. I can’t count how many times I’ve been hired to take a template club template or a template from Template Monster and apply it to Joomla or Open Realty. People send me an email, “Jared I bought this template and need it to work with Open Realty” yeah, okay, well its $100 for my time, send me the files and login details. I promise I’m not dictating price but what in that is worthy of $2k? I mean honestly! I did the same thing with a vBulletin site that the client had a commercial layout he paid $30 for and hired me for $150 to customize it. Thats fair! Right? But in each of these instances the client KNEW up front what that they would be getting, no deception, no lies, no fraud, no frills.

The only people who is going to keep unethical designers honest is you and me by exposing them in posts like this. I wont name people because that alone is unethical to do.

Conclusion: Any design downloaded from any of my domains FREELY is FREE and if you pay for modification then please know what you are getting before assuming anything. Customization not done by me simply isn’t my responsibility.

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2 Comments so far
  1. chris M August 7, 2007 6:54 pm

    Jared, if you release your free design templates under a Creative Commons license or GPL license you can dictate the terms of use to your users.

    They can still choose to ignore the license, but at least it will be a formal legal contract which will be legal if you decide to persue legal remedies. You can stipulate that certain parts of the code or design must remain unchanged e.g. your name as the originator for credit.

    Good luck

  2. admin August 7, 2007 7:08 pm

    Actually, when I release templates I never get wrapped up in trying to dictate how they are used. Most the time I release them and forget about them.

    I stumble up on them once in a while in DVD’s on Ebay which list things like 2,000 commercial quality templates only $14.95. I’ve looked at their list of designs and I’ve visited their sites (that usually last a month) and I find my work.

    There just isn’t a reliable way to dictate or enforce good moral character in end users for freely available items.

    I release only a few things Creative Commons but usually tend to go GPL.


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