other posted in other news  on 25 July 2009
by Andrew Lang 
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£20 a month offer ends on 1st September 2009

I've been offering the puresilva template to people for a monthly flat fee of £20. It's not the first time I've experimented with a low monthly price. It seems I introduce a monthly payment plan every year, but then discontinue it after 4 or 5 months :)

Why? Because I think it simply doesn't work. It encourages speculation rather than commitment, and commitment is absolutely necessary to succeed with a website. I also think the low price point can devalue the template and service we provide. There's a lot of competition out there offering very similar monthly price points, but really it's not good to align puresilva to these types of template providers as we are offering a much more personal service, working solidly on the template everyday in code development, supporting people 7 days a week, and providing hosting on dedicated servers with daily backups. The low price can align us to the type of web design company who simply resell open source solutions (e.g. ZenCart or OsCommerce) and have not coded the template from scratch and cannot provide updates nor dedicated server hosting. To be frank, this kind of alignment puts puresilva in a bad light. Anyone can set-up this kind of service in literally a few days. Puresilva, in its current build, will celebrate 5 years of continuous development on Monday 27th July 2009 - and there's still years of updates to come!

The puresilva template and service is in its own niche - between the bespoke developers to the shopping cart resellers.

You can collect quotes from many web design companies that are easily over £1000 for an e-commerce site. And you won't know what you'll get til you get it. And by which time, you've paid 30-50% deposit. Not only that, you can expect to be charged at least £35 per hour for their time for updates. And don't expect help on the weekends. Personally I find these kinds of costs prohibitive to any small business that is looking to get in profit within 2 or 3 months. Also the service can inhibit growth for the site - site owners don't want to update their site (as in, requesting new features) because it's simply too expensive.

It's also wrong to pick up the cheapest solution thinking that's a way to save money. That can be a way to ruin your reputation with server downtime, broken scripts, and an unprofessional website.

Hence our template was established to offer a professional website solution for a fraction of the cost of hiring developers to code something bespoke (that may not even be what you need), while also avoiding the cookie-cutter templates simply hosted (not created) by 3rd parties.

With all that in mind, the template will sell at a one-off cost of £250 (for 100% lifelong ownership) from 1st September 2009 and that price point will remain until 2011 when a price review will take place.

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