Visualbook – design manual template website

Hi there, I made this design manual / logo manual website template I am using for my clients, what do you think?

For now, I have 5 clients using this template:





And I am wondering how to monetize this template. If I will sell the .bssdesign file, there is serious possibility that this copy will be provided to others illegally:/

Any ideas?:slight_smile:

We are not here to help you sell products, or sites etc. We are here to help you with how BSS works in general. You’ll need to scour the internet for places that help with marketing for the rest.

The template looks nice and professional, but I doubt you’d have much success selling a template as a .bsdesign file. There is not a single .bsdesign file for sale on envato marketplace. In fact, I couldn’t find a single .bsdesign file for sale anywhere on the web.

The .bsdesign file format is proprietary, and although you might be allowed to legally resell them (you’d have to check with @martin,) the only people who would be able to open them are people who own Bootstrap Studio. People who buy website templates typically don’t expect to have to also buy the software used to create them

Traditionally, people who sell website “templates” sell the actual generated assets (CSS, HTML, JS, etc…)

I’m not sure what the rules/laws are regarding the reselling of Bootstrap, but there are tens of thousands of Bootstrap-based templates for sale (there are 29,531 on Envato market alone!) So I’d imagine at least that part of it is legal. As long as you stick to Google fonts, you should have no issues selling a template that uses them. They’re all free for commercial use, and for sale in third-party apps (like templates.) You may need a license to sell templates that use certain icon fonts like font awesome. Of course, any imagery you use as examples in your template would have to be original artwork of your own creation. Otherwise, you’d need explicit permission from the owners of the logos.

Envato market is a pretty big place for people to buy sell templates, so you might start by going there, and seeing what’s involved in becoming a reseller. Trying to sell website templates on your own, through your own website would be like trying to sell a needle in a haystack. Chances are, nobody would ever find you. You have to sell through the big, established companies like…



Keep in mind there are tens of thousands of people selling website templates at this point, so getting found, and established is not easy. There are thousands of website templates on envato that haven’t had a single sale. Some of them sit there for years unsold. EVERYONE these days wants to either be a web developer or sell website templates. I’m on Quora.com, and get bombarded daily by people (mainly from India) asking how they can make money doing website development.

It seems like everyone thinks the path to financial success is freelancing. It’s not. You need to have a serious competitive advantage, or a really good niche product, or a well developed referral network, to make a living selling websites these days.

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All due respect jo, he posted this in the showcase category, not in “help or how to.”

I think one of the big reasons we all pushed to upgrade the forums was so we could have categories for other subjects, so people could (for example) ask for general advice/help on non-BSS related issues.

Of course, you’re under no obligation to respond to them. :wink:

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Understood,

Also, WordPress is very proprietary and people sell those themes/templates like crazy, so I could see where a market might be started for BSS projects. Granted it may not be out there now, but nothing says we couldn’t facilitate something for it if it’s allowed. :slight_smile:

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My personal view is this sub Forum is (I think) supposed to be a showcase of members website, not specifically a sales tool.

I’m not against people selling their services but there needs to be upfront honesty and a different approach.

Ian

Think of .bsdesign files in the same way people sell .psd files through sites like envato.

When I last checked, Martin was fine with it :+1:

But as Iang states - show case of for users to share the sites they have built with other users to see.

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How discreet do you want the forum categories to be? I mean, we can have a Showcase category, and an Advice on Selling my Services Category… and an XYZPDQ Category, etc…

Most software forums eventually create a “General” category, or a category solely for non-software related discussions. Perhaps we should ask @martin to add one?

Personally, I’m not offended by someone asking for general advice on how to sell a site they’ve built with BSS and shown here, as long as they’re not trying to use the forum as their own personal sales page (which he certainly did not do.)

Personally, I don’t think that selling advice is something we should start getting into here. You will end up with a ton of party crashers (scammers and spammers so to speak) that will invest the extremely low price of the software (as we’ve already seen done over and over) just so they can spam ads in here.

I really think the forums should stay focused on dealing with the software and it’s output where output is mostly for displaying/sharing, asking for suggestions for improvements (not fixes, that should be in other help areas not in a Showcase area). Just my opinion of course out of the many. Just saying we’ve already seen how many times people have purchased the software just to get access to the forums to spam them. Imagine how that would be if they find out they have an outlet for advertising in here too?

I also would love to see more forums for various different avenues. Maybe Marketing Assistance could be one of them where people could ask questions, or people with marketing skills could advertise their services (legit ones of course, not sure how we’d manage those since we don’t have monitors as normal forums do, but I’m sure we can work something out.

  • Marketing Sharing and/or Requests (Share Experiences/Tips and/or Post to Request to hire someone to do Marketing work)
  • Coding Sharing and/or Requests (Share Experiences/Tips and/or Post to Request to hire someone to do Coding work)
  • General Chat, which we’ve lacked from day one really and which would typically be an open forum to non owners as well so they can ask pertinent questions prior to making a purchase. I realize the team at BSS want to have people contact them, but I think that sharing some of the do’s, don’ts, cans, and can’ts with a possible customer would be invaluable if done right.
  • BSS Hosting (Anything that pertains to the free hosting provided by BSS via the software)

Just my opinions of course. :slight_smile:

I’m sure we could come up with some other good forums to help organize the forums better for user ease of use.

Bingo. Any computer software that becomes successful enough to warrant a very active forum with hundreds of posts daily eventually need moderators. If BSS is headed in that direction, then they’re going to have to deal with this eventually. It’s one of the “growing pains” of any successful business.

But ultimately, it’s a positive thing, (just like having more categories) because you WANT lots of discussion, and people sharing and referring people to buy the software because it’s well supported by the users in the forums.

I mean, you have Pinegrow. I’m sure you’re a member in their forums. You can see how much more active that forum is than this forum. So they have moderators. It’s part and parcel of attaining success in the software industry. Just as, at some point, a real, thorough user manual for BSS will be necessaaary (if they want to continue to scale this company up.)

Otherwise, you end up hobbling yourself. You get frustrated users who buy the software, can’t figure it out, give up, and bad mouth the software to others. Plus, those of us who are loyal and active in the forums become exhausted doing the lion’s share of the software support.

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Very nice site @printninja well done!

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Everytime I look at this thread I wonder if it’s indeed spam by the OP?

No offense but I just dont understand why the need for 6 links really just demonstrating the same layout. Other than the desire to link to all those sites and their the outbound links.

Given this is the first thread created by the OP on the day they joined the forum, it makes me at least wonder. I do appreciate the CZ connection however. :wink: :czech_republic:

Aside from this sentence, which (to me at least) seem to have been posted quite innocently, I just see someone who shared their work with us to appreciate.

I don’t see anything nefarious going on here.

It’s a forum category to show off your work, and that’s what he did. I don’t see any rules or guidelines regarding the quantity of posts, or whether the sites need to be significantly different from each other.

And even if he did post them in the hopes of getting some backlink juice, what’s the harm? I seriously doubt Google considers the Bootstrap Studio forum a particularly prestigious website to have gotten back-linked from.

And it’s not like he asked anyone here to purchase his sites, or that they’re even for sale. He just wrote that he’s considering monetizing them as templates, and was concerned about the legality of selling a .bsdesign file.

I think people are reading way too much into this.

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Thank you very much jo. :blush: Although, it just occurred to me, I meant to post this as a new post in this showcase category, not as a response in this thread. So I’ve deleted it, and I’m going to create a new post for just this website.

haha I kind of figured that, but either way you’re welcome!

Thank you! My idea was to share my work. I registered here to share it with others for feedback, so I am new there:)

If it is possible to make thread for Marketing/Affiliate/Selling purposes, I will appreciate that for sure. I will be happy to share some ideas how creators could be more connected with BSS authors to do some long-term business.

Anyway, feel free to dele this thread if you decide that I am breaking some rules. Peace

So far I have only seen you post 2 places in the forums, and both are wanting to advertise. The forums here have not so far been set up for that, they have been mostly for people helping people with working with BSS. Marketing and Sales are really not something that have anything to do with BSS, that’s something you do on your own.

My voice would say no, please don’t incorporate this into BSS as it would create a nightmare of posts by spammers and scammers. The software is so extremely cheap to buy that it’s a pittance to pay to be allowed to post in these forums, compared to the amount of money they can make off the gullible. And there ARE a good number of newbies to websites that come here to prey on. Bad enough they do it in emails and facebook etc. Please don’t do that here. That’s my 10 cents on the subject.

Having said that, sharing your work that you have created in BSS (preferably not the same thing over and over in different color schemes) can be done in the Showcase forum right here that you are in. Just please only share sites you make with BSS so people can see what is possible with this software.

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Sorry, but I agree with Jo-r on this.

You shared your work for us to critique, which was fine, and we gave you feedback.
You asked a legit question about the legality of reselling .bsdesign files, which has been answered.

There are plenty of other forums and websites on the internet for people looking to sell their website designs/templates, regardless of the program they used to create them (which, incidentally, rarely matters to people who buy website templates, since they’re only concerned with the resources they’re getting - the HTML, CSS, JS etc.)

In my 2+ years owning/using BSS, and being very active in the forums, I have yet to come across anyone interested in a forum category dedicated to the discussion of marketing/selling BSS created websites. The BSS forums are comprised of a pretty tight group of dedicated users. Most of us do web design/development for a living, and those who don’t are typically using BSS to build a website for themselves, or to learn more about Bootstrap and web development.

The BSS developers are not interested in creating an affiliate program for this software (it’s been asked about before) and IMO selling website templates is basically like selling fonts on the internet. There are more of them out there now than will ever be used in a hundred years.

If that’s your passion, I’d suggest looking into the resources I posted earlier in this thread. Personally, I have zero interest in a forum category for such discussions, and I’ve really never seen any forum “regulars” who’ve expressed such interest, but ultimately it’s @martin’s call.

Meanwhile, this category is clear in its purpose - showcasing websites built with BSS. That’s the only “rule” I’m aware of, and it’s self-explanatory.

Hello @printninja printninja,

I 100% agree with you and also with @jo-r. Guys, thank you for your sincere feedback! In fact, after all that has been said, I would rather to delete this thread (but I have no right to do so?) and leave it clean and pure showcase again, only with examples and without talk about possible monetization (which is offtopic there).

Although it looks like that, I didn’t plan to monetize it like templates are sold today. After 17 years of experience in this industry (design), I don’t need to be another of the 10,000 authors who sell a universal template. But Visualbook is highly useful for a small group of my fellow designers and design agencies. They themselves want to use Visualbook for their clients and build design manuals on it, but I didn’t really know how to do it because selling a .bssdesign file = selling an entire project that could be illegally distributed over the internet.

I do not want to and cannot allow that, so I would rather not offer this option. The only way is to work more closely with BSS developers and create some security options against spreading the .bssdesign file, but of course you need to think about this whole idea, and from what I’ve read here, that’s not the way BSS developers want to go. I understand it 100%, so please humbly ask that this thread be deleted.

I am very grateful for BSS, it takes my work to the next level and I would not like this thread to arouse any negative emotions or assumptions. I really appreciate everyone involved in BSS and the rest of you who bring great and honest feedback here. Peace

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No harm done IMO. But I cannot delete posts/threads. Only the Devs can do that, so you may want to edit your last post and tag Martin in it by using the @ symbol and then typing his name (you should see his profile pop up in a list.)