Social networking templates and dating templates - our take.

As you know we don't provide a bunch a of design templates with Dolphin anymore. Surely, community sites, social networks and dating sites should have their unique designs, though. Moreover, we used to be in the lead in "templates" business and provided a lot of design templates adding new ones with every version. We still get questions and suggestions, like: "why don't you add an additional Facebook-like theme?" or "an included adult dating template would skyrocket your sales". We still don't do it. We probably will never do it and this position is strengthening to the point that I would argue that anyone who provides community software with lots of templates is diluting quiality of their product and selling "packaging" that you don't need. Deceitful upselling. Here's why:

Mass-production of dating and social networking templates defeats their purpose.

The main reason for using a non-standard template for your dating or social networking site is to make it look special, unique, different. To achieve that you need to (ideally) build it yourself, or order a custom one. As a compromise, you may take a design package from a smaller provider that only sells a handful of their products every month.

A template that has bold, unique attributes that make it stand out should never be shared with too many sites, or you're in risk of being recognized as a design thief. Thus, a generic, universal template that you customize via admin panel would work worlds better than a set of colorful rainbows and same smiling people found on a few hundreds of sites. In other words simple square cookies with different icing are perceived as unique a lot more than same gingerbread-men cutouts. You get the drift.

Large, experienced software providers worked it out long ago, and so you only get basic templates from Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal and, yes, BoonEx, too. Smaller providers still try to inflate value of their products by throwing in some bright and colorful designs. I think it's wrong, very wrong, almost dishonest and users should know why. There more to it...

If template is just and extra, it can't hurt, right? Wrong!

Ever wondered why Apple doesn't include a dozen of "extra/free/bonus" case covers with their iPads? That's because tastes differ, while you still pay for extras. There's no such thing as "free" product. Somebody has to pay for it. If you get templates - you pay for all of them. You pay for their development, ongoing support, testing, etc. What's worse - you would likely only use one of them, but you have to pay for the "maintenance" of all of them.

Development and testing for more than one template adds massive additional burden to the software provider. In our experience, a few additional templates may double version development time. That's true for any social networking or dating software, no matter what kind of templating engine they use, and how streamlined are their operations.

So,

• you get a template that's also used by hundreds of other sites
• you pay for all the included templates
• you wait longer for version updates
• you get increased chances of bugs occurrences in your template
• feature development and bug-fixing time is sacrificed for a more attention-grabbing practice of templates designing

Not cool.

Templates make good money. Not for you.

Been there, know that. When we were offering design templates we knew only too well that every new design would make a healthy sales-jump. We loved it. The other side of the coin was that we had to close eyes at some... discrepancies and tradeoffs that were quickly building up. Namely:

• Adding every new feature called for integration to all templates, but sometimes their designs couldn't accomodate, so we had to come up with excuses like "this template doesn't support zodiac signs", "you can't edit boxes titles in this template", or "this template is not compatible with version X.Y.Z yet (read - and it never will)".
• Bug reports and bug fixes always had to be processed considering the template in use. Just as an additional factor, like browser, web server, hosting OS, etc. Using more than one at once worsened it. But, what if the template didn't sell well, or was clumsy from day one. We'd just slowly depreciate it, by not adding display of new functionality. This is not unique to us. Such is the nature of web development.
• Website usability and accessibly guidelines can not be properly maintained across many templates. Zooming would break pictures; different navigation presentation brought unmanageable amount of layout variations, conflicting with menu builders; font faces, text sizes, line brakes and space constraints (all multiplied by language differences) would kill any uniformity and could not be duly regarded in all templates.
• more, more, more.

It still made money, though. Produced more refunds, yes. More negative reviews, yes. More frustration, support queries, complaints, unhappy clients, yes. Still, money talked, but, as Master Yoda said "The dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever it will dominate your destiny." At some point we have been able to make the right decision...

The virtuous approach to providing community, dating and social networking site templates.

As I noted before, this is the way most reputable web software developers choose for years. There must be one, or maybe 2-3 at a maximum very generic templates that are very easy to customize and build upon.

In Dolphin, we continuously work on making our default design universal. We plan to bring some MAJOR improvements in it in 7.1 as well. Ideally, webmaster should be able to significantly change site design using the default template. No issues during version upgrades, no troubles with new elements display, no compatibility flaws.

Now, many web-masters would rightfully want special look for their adult dating site or a social network for young musicians, or what not. That must be done by 3rd-party template developers that specialize in it, live and breath templates, upgrade them on time, check them, install them, charge for one template at a time, or even design custom designs for you...

The hard work of 3rd party template providers.

If you read carefully, by now you know that development and support of a good social software template is not a trivial undertaking. It takes a lot of work and time. It only pays off if the software is popular enough and demand for templates is significant. We are fortunate enough to see some developers offering quality templates via BoonEx Unity Market at very fair prices or even for free.

At Unity Market you'd find templates for Facebook-like sites, adult-themed sites, colorful generic templates, as well as integration and custom development services. We believe that this is as good as it gets - a secondary market that offers you real choice without messing with development process of the software.

Choose good provider, quality template and you'll win. Don't buy into flashy stacks of pre-made designs that come with (mostly dating) software.

Browse dating, social networking, adult and niche community templates at BoonEx Unity Market