Web Design Week on PSDTUTS + You Can Now Sell Photoshop Templates via ThemeForest

Dec 2nd in Articles by Collis

For as long as I can remember we've gotten requests for more web design posts here on PSDTUTS. Well web design fans, it's your lucky day because all this week we'll be bringing you articles and tutorials on just that topic. What's the occasion? Well today our sister site ThemeForest is adding a whole new section - Photoshop Templates - meaning you can now sell your straight Photoshop designs via ThemeForest.

Author: Collis

Hello! I started Psdtuts+ because years ago reading Photoshop tutorials was how I got into design. You can find me on Twitter or on my blog theNetsetter.

The Week's HUGE Schedule!

Because I'm notorious for planning and promising tutorials that I then completely forget to finish, this time I decided to write them all ahead of time, so readers, here's the schedule of posts to look out for, they are all (well mostly) ready and loaded into WordPress:

• Monday - How a Turn a Texture into a Seamlessly Tiled Background
• Monday #2 - How a Simple Layout Can Be Mixed 'n' Matched with Patterns, Photos and Backgrounds
• Tuesday - The 3 Components of Good Web Design
• Tuesday #2 - 9 Information Design Tips to Make You a Better Web Designer
• Wednesday - Photoshop Paper Texture from Scratch then Create a Grungy Web Design with it!
• Thursday - 8 Ideas, Techniques & Tricks for your Web Design Toolkit
• Thursday #2 - 14 Quick and Slick Portfolio Templates (via ThemeForest)
• Friday - Cliff Notes on a Website Redesign - Tips and Thoughts from the Creattica Inspire Design
• Saturday - 6 Interface Design Tips Every Web Designer Should Know
• Monday - Five Looks, One Layout: How to Develop a Library of Web Design Styles at Your Fingertips
• Monday - $25,000 Giveaway, Score ThemeForest Cash by Commenting

As you can see it's going to be one heck of a big week here on PSDTUTS, culminating in a big cash giveaway so that 2,500 PSDTUTS readers will get a credit on their accounts to test out the site (which of course means it's a good time to have files for sale).

Who am I?

Because advice is only as good as the person who gives it, I thought I should quickly mention who I am. My name is Collis! I have a love of exclamation marks and have been working as a web designer now for about 5 or 6 years. I design all the Envato sites like this one you're looking at right now, and prior to that I used to design for clients as a freelancer and a designer for a Sydney interactive agency. I certainly don't know everything about web design though, not even remotely close, so when reading the articles and tutorials this week, feel free to pipe in with a comment on your thoughts and how things could be done better!

... And please excuse all the exclamation marks. I try to remember to edit them out - I really do, but it's just how I talk. Everything, especially web design, always seems so exciting :-)

The first article will be up in, oh, about 2 minutes! So enjoy Web Design Week, hopefully we can make it an annual tradition, and if you're interested in selling your work via ThemeForest, then read on to learn more!

Earn Extra Dough, Sell Your Designs ... Over and Over

If you haven't seen ThemeForest already, then I'm probably not doing my job (I'm responsible for marketing!), so you should head over immediately to keep me out of trouble. The site lets you buy and sell website templates in three forms:

1. Photoshop Designs - A set of PSD files
2. HTML Templates - Actual working web templates
3. CMS Themes - Ready made and customizeable themes for CMS'es like WordPress, Blogger, and more

Anyone with a bit of talent can sell their work and earn anything from a side income (check out this article - How I make $2000 a year without doing very much) to a pretty large paycheck (check out 9 Tips for Maximizing a Steady Income Stream by Selling Stock ). You are actually selling a license to use the design or template, which means you can keep selling the same item over and over which is the beauty of creating a passive income stream that keeps trickling in months or years after you've stopped working on it.

ThemeForest launched just recently and most authors only have a few items in their portfolio, but nevertheless there are already four authors earning over a thousand a month. And that number will only climb as more people are introduced to the site and author portfolios get larger. Each time you sell an item you receive a slice of the cash, ranging between 25% and 50% of the sale depending on whether you are selling elsewhere and how well you are doing. On top of that if you refer customers you'll get another 50% through the referral program.

So you might be thinking, hey I'm a web designer, why don't I just make a website to sell my own items! What ThemeForest provides is a service to take all the hassle out of selling. If you sell your templates with us you won't need to do anything other than upload them. We take care of payments, refunds, marketing, hosting, and pretty much everything aside from the actual templates themselves, we bring thousands of buyers from our related marketplaces FlashDen and AudioJungle as well as a solid, easy to use site and system. And if you find selling templates is making you a mint, you can always set up your own shop later anyway.

Another common question is why the low %'s. Actually there are similar (competing) marketplaces around for both Flash and Themes, and they offer higher commission rates than FlashDen and ThemeForest (from memory 50% - 60%). So you'd think that would logically mean more income right? Nope, we work very hard to make sure that our sites benefit authors and I'm confident you'll find that you can get *by far* the best result selling through the Envato Marketplaces. Still I always encourage everyone to do your research and figure out the best solution for you. And we'll keep working hard to make sure that best solution just happens to be us :-)