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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

I've used a few approaches:

1) BCC (old design): Grabbed an appropriate template from oswd.org. Chopped the heck out of it. Cost: free, but spent quite a bit of time. Quality: it didn't scare people?

2) BCC (new design): Found a very talented young lady in India on elance. Cost: a few hundred bucks. Quality: I won't win most-beautiful-site-ever awards, but the cost performance was outstanding.

3) Appointment Reminder: WooThemes template, lightly customized with a logo from 99Designs and a central image that a designer friend made for me. Cost: $169 + what the designer charged. He asked me not to say, but suffice it to say that it is much less than you are contemplating. Quality: The app itself doesn't knock socks off, but the front page does.

I don't begrudge the high-end designers their fees -- some of them produce very nice work indeed. However, I don't know if that's necessarily the best place to put $10k to work for a B2B startup.

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Ever since I read a comment by patio11 a few months ago, I've converted completely to buying ready-made themes for WordPress whenever I want to put up a "sales" site.

Getting 3 themes at WooThemes will run you about $70. Those three themes each come in several color variations too. That means the next 3 times you decide to throw up a website, it should take almost no work (design-wise). WooThemes is really easy to use and customize, and they have good documentation.

This makes throwing up a sales site really easy. Effectively, any time I create an app, the first step is to put up a WordPress site with a WooThemes theme, build up the copy/etc, then copy the design for use in the actual application.

Note: I usually host my sales site on www.MyAppName.com, and have my "actual" application (a Django app) running from a subdomain like app.MyAppName.com. This way, I host my WordPress sales site completely separately from my app, which is easier for me to manage and to not screw up.

WordPress themes are not just for sales sites. The "Admin Templates" on Theme Forest [1] offer some great options for B2B applications.

[1] http://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/admin-templat...

The "Admin" templates on Theme Forest are really kind of blowing my mind right now. Every front-end-challenged web app developer on HN should know about this.

Preemptively: so what if every app that uses these look the same? They'll all look similarly competent. Most native apps look more alike than different, too.

This is crazy awesome. Thanks for showing this to me.

PS: if you read the comments on the Adminaca theme --- which is LUDICROUSLY AMAZING --- you will find a guy complaining that the price got jacked up... from $12 to $20. If ever you needed a parable exhorting you not to design products for the kinds of people who use ThemeForest...

I use these for the guts of AR, too. $15, shaved a month off my schedule, and since it came in eight colors I got one feature bullet for free.

WOW!

If anyone hasn't seen these, seriously, check them out.

I've used Theme Forest themes before for sales sites, but never found great themes for a web app. These are definitely going to the top of my list for the next time I need to build something.

thanks for this. I think I just saved myself several thousand dollars. Some of those themes are as good as anything on dribbble or sortfolio.

Looks like off-the-shelf + customisation is the way to go. Thanks everyone!

I posted a stand-alone follow-up post to this comment:

Read: http://geekfactor.charrington.com/2011/03/use-admin-template...

Discuss: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2347559

I'm a designer and wordpress hacker. I tried WooThemes on a project recently, in an effort to save time and money for the client. They're great if you're willing to totally sacrifice to the design in the theme. But once you want to start customizing, they can become painful quickly.

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