Pay or Self Design?

[Xyphien]

Do you end up paying or designing your website/forum/blog yourself? Or... do you do a little bit of both?



Personally, I do both. It really depends on what I'm doing, and for whom. If it's for me then chances are I'll buy a pre-made theme, style, etc. and then build around that. Change some things around to my liking, etc. If it's for a client, I'll more than likely do everything myself unless the client states they wish to have it in a way that may require a pre-made theme, or addon.

 

[Altair]

I will be doing both. For now only I have done it my self.
I will be buying a theme for an upcoming forum. Same with other sites down the line.

 

[Oblivion Knight]

Before XenForo I would always try to come up with my own designs from scratch, or I would buy a website template from somewhere and adapt this into a forum design. For the most part, this worked pretty well. The code wouldn't always be pretty but some of those designs would be pretty unique.

Since starting with XenForo, I've been hugely impressed by some of the third-party themes on offer and felt that no amount of work that I did would be able to compete. So I changed my approach slightly, and now buy pre-made themes as a base and build around them. I did it with Nerdface, and I'm doing it with Umbrella Online.

 

[TopSilver]

What I usually do to keep it A-professional is buy a theme from pixel exit with a framework and then change it up a tad bit to be unique. That's what I did with my site and enjoying how it looks a good bit. I really think I did well for the sites theme quite a bit. Looking forward to watching my site grow. I couldn't be more happy with my choice of theme provider.

 

[sincerem]

Webmaster who needs the best for his or her website doesn't rely solely on his or her skill to design and manage a website all alone. At least at some point, the webmaster hire fellow webmasters to help in fixing some things in the website to improve its stability and xD.

 

[Demon_skeith]

Even though I have photoshop, I still pay others as I don't have a creative mind.

 

[apathy]

I like to do the styles myself, with graphics being made by a fellow admin, though our skins aren't too far off the default Xen layout.

 

[Xyphien]

I like to do the styles myself, with graphics being made by a fellow admin, though our skins aren't too far off the default Xen layout.

I've done that with one of my more professional websites as well. I used the images from my game to develop a custom skin that's really close to the xenforo base.

 

[apathy]

I've done that with one of my more professional websites as well. I used the images from my game to develop a custom skin that's really close to the xenforo base.

I mean its a pretty solid layout, pretty hard justify changing it up just for the sake of it
I've always liked sites that use spites/2D graphics for their images, a number of Zelda fan forums I was a member of back in the day would style their sidebar containers etc with sprites of pillars from in game and such - tends to looks pretty good so I'm sure your site is no different!

 

[Abizaga]

I hired Themehouse to design my forum's custom theme lol.