Start Up Idea: Turning the web into a giant design template market

[peternicholls]

We are taking a risk on talking about our idea but we am convinced the benefits of doing so out way the risk + we have a lot of respect for this community.

As the title says, we want to turn every website into a potential design template that can be sold. To get this to happen we obviously need the site owners to be willing to sell, so our first questions are:

Would you sell your web sites design? If so for how much? If not, would you sell previous designs? If so how much? If not the entire design would you sell parts? Such as buttons, images etc?

What are you thoughts on the idea?

My team and I have started work on the idea but different thoughts on how it should be done would be great.

Cheers

[andrewljohnson]

Why would anyone pay for a design template, when they can just go to any website they want, download it for free, change it to their liking, and use it?

Most people are pretty liberal about taking CSS/HTML code from websites to use as a model for their own websites. As long as you don't rip off people's images, exact color schemes, etc., the underlying code tends to be pretty generic and fairly immune from any sort of copyright prosecution. And who would want a website that looks a lot like someone else's?

Can you tell me about a use case or two you imagine? Who buys someone else's templates? What sort of person or business? What do they do with the template afterwards... do they change it, or do you imagine the web will be like Blogger where 4 templates rule millions of sites?

I imagine that it will be hard to make this market, when people already expect to get this for free. You're asking the wrong questions... everyone would be willing to sell their templates, but you should be asking who would be willing to buy.

[socialtistics]

Not to shoot your idea down, but I agree with the other comment. But, to answer your question sure I would sell my designs. Who would buy them is a different question though. Like the other comment, what stops a potential customer from just downloading my page, stylesheets, js files, etc... and making them their own?

For unique templates, companies like TemplateMonster have made a good business for themselves selling web templates though and I would see them as your primary competition in this market. With their brand recognition and affiliate program though I would find it difficult to believe you would have a chance at competing against them unless you developed a different, better, pricing model and provided better services (i.e. include template customization or css conversion at no charge for customers).

[shotgun]

I think you're about two steps ahead of a really great idea--but the devil is in the details and you need to iterate a few more times to arrive at a viable approach, IMO.

Your business model will be more successful if it doesn't require permission from site owners in the first place. I have some ideas around this and would be willing to share them off-HN.

[Allocator2008]

Could you not send out an array of spiders to crawl around and cache pages, then send the cached pages back to some kind of processing mill, to purge out the data from the pages and output the basic designs of the pages, whereupon these "purged pages" could be sent to a second mill to categorize them and persist them in some way? Then you could mine your persisted store of purged pages for various things based on user request. So the user says, I want a button. So you mine your database for buttons and display them and the user picks the one she likes for some kind of minimal fee. Instead of getting the templates from human submissions, have spiders get them instead and purge them and persist them, similar to having a sweatshop of gold miners to pan the stream, sift out the gold, and drop them into storage bins. Then all you do is sell the gold directly to the customers. Something like that?