@nathrat
If you think about it though, the fact that these template sites exist kind of kill business for web designers. Many potential clients know places like themeforest exist, so when they see a template for $32 or whatever, they wonder why they should even bother paying a designer in the first place.
...
I understand not getting credit for your design is frustrating, but maybe that’s the price that has to be paid in order to kill their profession.
I understand where your thought process is coming from nathrat, but allow me a respectful counterpoint:
What we’re doing here doesn’t kill the profession at all, it empowers designers to save time and money on dev costs and it’s part of the natural progression of our industry (look at any other industry in history and you’ll see the same trends towards the commoditization of items that were previous big-ticket services). It’s kinda surprising that it took this long for our quickly moving industry to hit this stage.
Case in point: Film developers were probably just as pissed when the first serious digital camera came out, but Flickr is bigger than ever and the photography field as a whole has benefited; although I’m sure there’s still some curmudgeonly Luddites out there that gripe about it on stone tablets.
Frankly, (and with all due respect) if you can’t find a way to convince your client (who let’s assume knows that you are starting with a template) that it’s going to cost them $X,XXX to customize, perhaps you couldn’t have made the sale in the first place 
Some of my biggest clients over the past 18 months have actually started with them asking for customization requests to a template, and showing 4 or 5 templates as optional designs has become a fixture in the initial design phase of most projects. There’s honestly no need to hide the fact that we’re using templates – it’s not dirty or shameful or unoriginal if you’re doing it right. It’s only when the client finds out late in the game that you’re using someone else’s template that it becomes awkward and dishonest. Educating clients has always been a key to the sales process, this is just another in a long series of updates to the sales pitch. The alternative is an industry-wide knownledge blackout where web designers collectively try to convince their clients that they create web sites with magic wands and fairy dust.
Personally, I use templates (as do most of my colleagues and many studios that I work with) as a major selling point. Since we started using templates our rates have gone up, as have the number of gigs that we can take on per month. Even if your average price per project goes down, your volume should be skyrocketing at this point. Honestly, all that this recent trend has done is remove the headache part of web design and streamlined our ability to meet the ever growing demands of clients.
I hear you on the “fear of the entire industry collapsing” notion, but web design has always been an industry where you keep up or get out – every month there’s something new and hot that you’ve gotta adapt to – and most designers would be liars if they claimed that they wrote every line of code (including JS, jQuery, PHP , the entire Wordpress backend, etc.) for each project they have ever worked on. Web designers recycle each others work and innovate beyond it – it’s part of what makes this such an awesome and invigorating job in the first place. Having readily available creative tools don’t diminish what we do, it frees us up to kick even more butt than we were previously kicking.
Don’t fear the templates, use them to your own advantage – the industry is never going to be the same as it was a year ago – whether it be 2000, 2010 or 2020, which is the reason most of us chose this as a profession in the first place.
Request processing...