Creating Your Offline Marketing Website...Template Or From Scratch?

By chance, are you using itheme or artisteer? Those two keep coming up....

Just checked out ThemeForest....Wow! So much to choose from!

Any favorite or preferred themes on there for offline marketers?

Thanks!

I've been using Wordpress with free templates that I then customize. I can create a new site in 30 minutes.

Bonnie

I use themeforest InFocus. It's a very professional looking system and is very customizable with a good admin page to do the customizing from. It took me an hour to throw up a first run site. I was only interested in providing a place for people to see testimonials. I need to take a second run at it soon.

you can see it at Effective Web Marketing

There's a lot I'm going to change about it. But it looks professional out of the box. And I've had lots of positive comments about it.

itheme agency is good too.

I've also had the experience that Avenuegirl did. I sold for 9 months and did steady business before I put up a site. When people asked about my site I just told them that no one searches the internet to find what I do. And they readily agreed.

That's not bad, but unfortunately it's not wordpress.


Up until now, I've done offline stuff and no one has asked to see my personal site or a full portfolio (don't ask how I've managed this, lol).

My main reasons now for putting a site together is that I'm moving again and I think having a reference site will push people a bit quicker. I'm going into unchartered waters and will need to establish myself quickly.

This site is truly a personal site and portfolio type site so I opted to go with my real name for the domain (I have other plans for my avenuegirl site) and I'm avoiding that corporate type look.

Avenuegirl.com is actually from themeforest - and I did a bit of customization with the icons and photos so you would never know where it came from exactly. I actually just went to look so I could show you what the original looked like, but looks like it's been removed from their inventory.

I'm not too worried about anyone having the same theme as those themes get personalized with your own logo and content. I'm more concerned about the layout and maybe some other fun things it might do - but layout options are #1.


That being said, I had/have a picture in mind of how I want the pages to be displayed and here is what I've been looking at:

WordPress - Smart Portfolio - Wordpress Edition - ThemeForest is what I initially came across, but after checking out this designers other stuff I am leaning toward this:

WordPress - Minimal Wordpress Portfolio - ThemeForest

I will have some video samples, and links to other website projects I've worked on, and there will be blog room for general ramblings to personalize me a bit to new people.

But this particular site will not be pushed as a lead capture site. It will be given out on a business card to people I've already captured via other means.

The area I'm moving to will have its dedicated directory site where I'll put some big things up for free - like the local airport and the mall and will list some retail chain places that I know won't be needing a website from me and who are not my potential clients. As the clients fill in I can remove what I don't like/need so clients get the focus.

I'll be getting out the phonebook once I get to the new spot, and actually I just found the chamber of commerce site for this area which lists a ton of businesses, many of which have no website and for those that do I can see if they are even listed on google places - many are not.

But back to the subject, lol.

I think everyone needs to determine their own image. Do you want to be seen as industrial or personal?

Then you need to determine what you are putting on the site. Figure out what you need first, and give yourself a little breathing room.

Determine what color scheme you want, and keep in mind you can get photos and icons that look professional - I like to use dreamstime and they are really cheap for lower res professional pics. You don't need the super high res for web graphics. Everything gets pixels reduced for faster loading anyway.

I do look at how many have downloaded the same theme, but I also look for all the customizations that will make it very different from the others.

It's also ideal when you are buying a theme to see if you can get some interaction with the creator. I've had custom pages created at no additional charge - all because the person who created the theme realizes they are usually things they can add to give more value to the package.

Today I was reintroducing myself to headway - but found some issues with centering and full control can only truly be achieved with a good knowledge of CSS IMO.

Will wait till I get frustrated, and probably swipe up one of those themes above.

Never mind on artisteer...all kinds of complaints in their forum.

Where possible I go with Wordpress, but sometimes you just get that stubborn client that insists it must all be in some other programming language and will not be budged by the fact you can get the same functionality through Wordpress.

As for whether or not to use a template... it depends on the client, but I have built up a fairly large collection of templates that I use at times.