Ask HN: Would you buy a fast-loading, accessible website template in HTML/CSS?

[interfacesketch]

Are there any opportunities in designing (and selling) website themes that are fast-loading and accessible and written in plain html and css (not Wordpress, or a CSS framework)?

In another Ask HN on web design [1], posters say don't offer design services. But presumably, even when you're developing the backend, you need to reach for a front-end design or template - either free or for sale. The market for HTML/CSS themes is completely saturated though - is it fruitless to pursue this avenue?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18945658

[pickpuck]

Looks to me like the going price for static templates is $20-$50.

https://themeforest.net/category/static-site-generators https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates https://jekyllthemes.io/premium

[ishjoh]

I'm glad you've point the OP to themeforest, I've purchased a few themes in the past. One thing I will say is that sometimes it's worth re-implementing the code as the code can be quite bad, YMMV.

[bigiain]

In my opinion, there is without doubt a market, but your main challenge is going to be marketing your themes.

In a professional context, paying $29 or $50 or even $up-to-a-couple-of-hundred for a base/starting theme is a no brainer _if_ it's good enough, and you're convinced it'll not be a nightmare to adopt/extend/maintain in the future.

That "convincing" bit is hard...

Like pickpuck points out, ThemeForest will be one of your major competitors, so you'll need to work out good answers to two fairly difficult questions:

1) How are you going to differentiate your themes from free or inexpensive ones from ThemeForest?

2) How are you going to compete on marketing - SEO/Word Of Mouth/developer "mindshare" against ThemeForest (and al the other longstanding well-SEO-ed theme suites in Google)?