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Episode 219 - How to Build and Sell Showit Websites
617 Plays8 months ago
Lately we’ve been receiving a lot of questions about designing and selling Showit templates, so I roped Krista into doing a quick, 20 minute, q+a style podcast episode with me while I asked her some of the questions.
If you’re thinking about becoming a designer or if you’re already a designer and you want to start designing and selling Showit website templates, this is a great place to start. We cover what you need to get started, helpful Showit resources, our favorite ecommerce platforms for actually selling templates, where Krista designs templates and some of her favorite design related tools, and what kinds of support we offer for template sales.
As always, links and resources can be found in the show notes. Check ’em out at https://daveyandkrista.com/how-to-build-and-sell-showit-websites/. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts.
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Transcript
Introduction to Showit and Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
If you're a designer and you're creating this, everything is going to be really straightforward for you. You think about design all day. If you've designed other types of websites, I think that designing Showa is also going to be really intuitive. But think about like a florist who their skill is in putting flowers together in beautiful arrangements. And then they get on a website and all of a sudden it's like they have no idea how to use anything.
00:00:22
Speaker
Some people have used Canva and so that's kind of a natural jump from Canva over to show it. If all of this is new for them, they're going to be pretty overwhelmed.
00:00:31
Speaker
You're listening to The Brands That Book Show, a podcast for creative entrepreneurs who want practical tips and strategies to build engaging brands and craft high converting websites. We're your hosts, Davey and Krista, co-founders of a brand and website design agency specializing in visual brand design and show it websites. You're listening to The Brands That Book Show.
00:00:53
Speaker
Lately, we've been receiving a lot of questions about designing and selling show it website templates.
Designing and Selling Showit Templates
00:00:58
Speaker
So I wrote Krista into doing a quick 20 minute Q&A style podcast episode with me while I asked her some of the questions that we've received lately. So if you're thinking about becoming a designer or you're already a designer and you want to start designing and selling show it website templates, this is a great place to start.
00:01:16
Speaker
We cover what you need to get started, helpful show at resources, our favorite e-commerce platforms for actually selling templates, where Krista designs templates and some of her favorite design related tools, and then what kinds of support that we offer for template sales.
00:01:32
Speaker
As always, links and resources can be found over in the show notes. Check them out at davianchrista.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving a review over at Apple Podcasts. Also, over in the show notes, if you are a designer, we have all sorts of free design-related resources for designers. So head on over to the show notes to check those out.
00:01:53
Speaker
Now onto the episode.
FAQ: Designing Showit Templates
00:01:56
Speaker
All right, so we have been receiving a lot of questions lately about designing and selling show at website templates. So specifically other designers or people who want to become designers reaching out asking about how they can design their own show website templates and sell those.
00:02:13
Speaker
So I thought it'd be fun to just have a podcast episode dedicated to asking you some of these FAQs. And it's very much going to be, I think, an FAQ style podcast episode. All right. I feel like I'm at a bit of a disadvantage because normally when you have somebody on the podcast, you send them questions like a week in advance and they get to think through their answers. But you gave me zero prep. You just kind of sprung this on me. And so I hope I do okay.
00:02:39
Speaker
Yeah, I'm sure you'll be fine and no pressure, no pressure. But anyways, if you're listening to this episode and you're interested in this topic, we don't cover the question that you're asking yourself. You should let us know. And this is a topic I think that even some of these questions that I'm going to ask you, I think they could be turned into whole episodes.
00:02:57
Speaker
So if you're listening, you have additional questions like this, let us know. You can let us know in a few different ways. You can leave a review on Apple and let us know that you like this format and this topic in particular. You can send us a DM on Instagram. You can send us an email, but let us know. And if we hear from you, we'll likely continue creating content around this topic. So let's dive in. First things first, what do you need in order to start designing and selling show at website templates?
00:03:26
Speaker
this is going to sound really elementary and kind of obvious, but you need a show it website account. So if you don't actually have a show account, you're not going to be able to create those designs and sell them. And I'm going to say that show it is also very different from something like WordPress templates or other template sites. And so if you aren't familiar with their templates,
00:03:46
Speaker
that you're gonna be at a disadvantage. So I think it's a good idea to create an account and then know how their blogs are set up because there's some intricacies of creating the templates that you need to be familiar with. It's also important that if you're gonna be creating templates, you use one of their starter templates. And so these are gonna be templates that are listed as free in the account. And they're gonna say that they were made by Show It. I think there's three of them right now. And if you go to their help area, you can figure out exactly which ones those are.
00:04:14
Speaker
But if you're going to be selling templates later down the line, you can't use a design that was created by another designer. You need to use one of their starter templates. And I believe that they have a way of seeing which template something started with in their account, right? So like if you were to sell this later down the line, especially in their design market, you could run into some wiggle like problems area there. Yeah, for sure.
00:04:35
Speaker
And basically, just to untangle that maybe a little bit more for people, this is what you're speaking to is if somebody wants to design their own templates and sell those. There are people who have built their businesses, customizing other people's templates, and that's totally okay. So for instance, we have designers who work with clients, they buy one of our templates, and they customize that for a client, and that's totally okay.
00:04:59
Speaker
I would say most designers are going to ask that you leave their original credit in the design. So you might say template by David and Krista customized by Sam Jones. That's not even just a recommendation. I think like that's illegal. Yeah. Show it. I think in even in their help docs say, Hey, listen, if you're customizing somebody else's template, you can definitely say customized by, but you want to leave the original design or at least, you know,
00:05:22
Speaker
There's a specific way in which you want to give the original designer a nod. It's something to just keep in mind there. So as you set up your Show It account, make sure you know what those starter templates are that you can use as sort of a base in creating your own designs. What resources does Show It have to help you
Tools and Resources for Showit Templates
00:05:39
Speaker
get started?
00:05:39
Speaker
They have a great course that teaches you how to put those templates together. I think they call it their design market standards course. It's free to go through and it makes sure that you're doing all of the little intricacies of creating great templates. So limiting the number of heading tags that you're using on pages, including very specific pages that are going to be applicable to all users. There's a lot of formatting that you need to pay attention to when you're creating the blog. And this course is going to teach you how to do that.
00:06:07
Speaker
I think it actually gives you a quiz and a score at the end and you have to pass it, but I think you can retake things if you feel it. So don't stress out about it. Technically, you don't have to take the course in order to start selling templates. No, that's true. If you ever wanted to apply to be a design partner and then to apply to their design market, you would need to have passed this course in order to do that.
00:06:28
Speaker
Excellent. And so let's talk a little bit of this distinction there. You can be a show it design anybody, you know, who wants to be a designer can sign up for a show to count and start designing on show it and start building their own templates and selling them on their own. All right, and their show designer, you can also earn yourself the badge or the title of show it design partner. And that requires what in general, I mean, there's more information on their side about this. But typically, what is that?
00:06:57
Speaker
Yeah, I think that you have to have designed at least a few Show It websites, and you have to link to those when you apply. Honestly, I think that we did this almost 10 years ago, so I can't remember exactly what they are. They're gonna have them listed on their site. I know that's a big one. Yeah, and the Design Market Standards course, I think, is probably still part of it. And when you become a Show Design partner, you get to go on the Show It website, so people looking for a Show It designer can search and find you there. And then, like you said, Show It has their own template shop as well.
00:07:26
Speaker
that Show-It design partners can exclusively contribute to. Even as a design partner, you can't just put whatever site you want there. That still has to be accepted. So we won't go down that rabbit trail anymore. But just in case, I just wanted people to hear that they can get started regardless of becoming a Show-It design partner. So you can get started as a Show-It designer. You don't have to worry about any of that. All right, awesome.
00:07:49
Speaker
Okay, so you have your show it account. You familiarize yourself with show it. Maybe you've been designing on show it for a while. You're ready to create your own templates. Maybe let's start at the end of the process because we get a lot of people asking about how they actually sell those templates. You know, so I'm thinking like the cart system, the e-commerce solution that they use to actually sell those templates. So what opinions do you have on that? I know for from our own journey, we've tried out a number of different systems.
00:08:13
Speaker
Yeah, so by default show it is not an e-commerce platform. So that means you're going to need to connect it to a third party system in order to sell your products and do a checkout. There are a few different ways that you can do that. One of the first and probably easiest and most cost effective ways, especially if you're getting started is to sign up for Shopify. You don't need a Shopify storefront.
00:08:35
Speaker
You want what used to be called Shopify Lite, but basically I think you pay like $10, $12 a month and you can get embeddable buttons that you can then take to show it and embed on the show it pages that you make your product pages individually in your show it account. You embed these buttons and then it takes people off of your site to the checkout in Shopify. It can connect with different payment processors. The whole checkout process is pretty streamlined and I think it's a great way to get started.
00:09:03
Speaker
Awesome. What tool do you typically recommend? My favorite e-commerce platform is probably WooCommerce just because it's the most powerful. It can be integrated with Show It. You might run into some technical things with that and so their help team is great for that too. But with WooCommerce you can do all of the checkout on your existing Show It site and I think it's the most powerful tool out there.
00:09:25
Speaker
And looking at maybe a quick comparison between WooCommerce and something like Shopify, WooCommerce, you're going to have a little bit more flexibility than going Shopify Lite. But you could theoretically build yourself a Shopify website and sell your templates on Shopify using their storefront.
00:09:46
Speaker
So like if you wanted to make your main website a show it site, you could keep that a show it site and then link over to like a store.davianchrista.com and have all of your products listed there. I think that Shopify designer is not quite as easy as other designers, especially if you're coming from show it, but it would list out your products in a way that like automatically orders them and categorizes them. And so that could be another solution.
00:10:11
Speaker
Yeah, I think the trade-off that people are going to have to weigh is just like a little bit of how much e-commerce functionality they want, and then how much of the beauty and design control they have of something like show it, right? In our experience at least, trying to keep everything on the same site I think is the wise move. I think from an SEO perspective, it makes more sense. From a usability perspective, it makes more sense. We use Shopify Lite for a while. Things got tedious once we got, I don't know.
00:10:40
Speaker
I don't know, like above a dozen products because so unlike something like WooCommerce or a different like store system, you have to manually create all of your product listings on your shop page. And so if you're adding new products, you have to manually sort them. If you're going to run a sale and you wanted to autocross out the prices to show when they're discounted, you'd have to manually do that. And so it got a little tedious for us to keep doing that.
00:11:05
Speaker
Yeah. So I think those are the two better options. I think if you're going to be a show it designer, then WooCommerce is probably the way to go. There are other options out there. So I don't know if they're even worth mentioning, like for instance, a thrive cart, and we compare some of these options on our blog as well. We recently released where we are.
00:11:23
Speaker
I can't remember if it's released yet. Okay, so it's already out. How did you e-commerce on your show website? Thrivecart would be another option. That's something that we use though for like our course sales. Thrivecart is a great cart system for like the end of a funnel, like a course funnel, but you can't add multiple products to a cart and check out with Thrivecart.
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah. And so if you're going to do smaller website templates, like add-on pages, somebody wouldn't be able to buy those at the same time that they're buying a full website template. A decent amount of our products are add-on pages. And so that was an issue for us. We had a lot of customers who wanted to buy multiple things at the same time and not go through two checkouts. So if you just are selling like full website templates and that's all you want to do, Thrivecart could be a good option. It can do bump bump offers and upsells and all of those.
00:12:12
Speaker
Another nice thing about it is it's a one-time fee. So check out those options. I think for a lot of people, WooCommerce is probably the way to go. Let's move on talking about cart solutions, unless you think that there's something that we didn't talk about on that front. No, I mean, I think I could talk about it forever, but it'd be really detailed.
00:12:28
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, at the end of the day, regardless of what cart solution you choose, ultimately, what you're delivering is a share key, you know, for you're not actually delivering a file, although you might also deliver files associated with, you know, how to set things up, you know, if you have like a PDF that goes along with Well, normally you put the share key in a PDF.
00:12:49
Speaker
Sure. Sure. Point being is it doesn't really matter. Most cart solutions are going to have that kind of functionality, right? So let's jump to maybe the designing of the template. You know, we get a fair amount of questions about that as well and how we design templates. There's probably some of the best practices here, but it's also one of those things that you can do. I think a million different ways. So, you know, what would you recommend on that front?
00:13:11
Speaker
So I know that some people like to just go right to show it and start designing in there. That is not my preference. I feel like it can be harder to test different fonts or swap images in and out. And while those are really easy to do once things are built and established, I feel like when I'm in the designing phase and I want to test out a bunch of things at once and even just like see like a broad visual, like these are my colors and these are my fonts and these are some of the images I want to use. I like designing in sketch.
00:13:39
Speaker
Sketch, I think it's like $99 a year. It's similar to the Creative Suite, but it's actually made for web designers. And so it's easy to group elements and put things in like a header where you update the header on one page and updates on the others. It's easy to export your files as SVGs and JPEGs and PNGs, and you can scale them up and down. Whereas like with the Adobe Suite, you have to often make a new file and the saving process is just a lot more tedious. Sketch really makes that easy.
00:14:09
Speaker
So Sketch is definitely my favorite. I know a lot of people these days also like Figma. I don't have a lot of experience with that, but I think it's similar to Sketch. You could also use Illustrator and the Adobe Suite. I don't know that I would use Photoshop. When I was in design school, that's what we were taught to use, but designs in Photoshop are not easy to scale and it doesn't export SVGs well. So my preference, if you're gonna do the Creative Suite will probably be Illustrator.
00:14:36
Speaker
Canva is also another good design software to have, but I wouldn't design websites in Canva. I think it's good for graphics, but if you need fine detail and you need to really play with different things and test things out, I think that Sketch or Illustrator are going to be your best options.
00:14:53
Speaker
Yeah. Okay. That's great. And that's one of the questions that we get pretty often is like, do you design the templates in show it or do you use another tool? We get a lot of other questions about design. I mean, of course, but along the lines of color palettes, stock photos, fonts.
00:15:09
Speaker
I don't know if it's worth going over those in this episode because we have blog posts that provide the lists of places where you can get stock photos, some of our favorite fonts, and for fonts in particular, I think we have blog posts on fonts generally that we like, Google fonts that we like, how to choose fonts for your website, and the same thing with color palettes. I think we have a YouTube video on how to create a color palette.
00:15:36
Speaker
and also different resources for doing so and how to add it to show it. So if you're listening and you're like, oh, I'd love a little bit more information on the design aspect of things and it falls into one of those categories, check out the show notes. I'll make sure that we link to all of those individual resources around maybe some of those more design questions. And if those resources don't answer your question, like I said, write in, let us know.
00:15:59
Speaker
and will likely create more content around it. So let's jump to maybe some of the other stuff in terms of training. I think that's another set of questions that we often get is like, how much support do you offer somebody after the fact?
Support and Resources for Users
00:16:14
Speaker
I think, again, this is one of those where it's like, you ask 10 different businesses this question, they probably do it in nine different ways and 10 different levels of support. Do you have any general thoughts there?
00:16:26
Speaker
My preference would always be to provide as many resources and as much support as you can. Like if you're a designer and you're creating this, everything is going to be really straightforward for you. You think about design all day. If you've designed other types of websites, I think that designing Showa is also going to be really intuitive. But think about like a florist who their skill is in putting flowers together in beautiful arrangements. And then they get on a website and all of a sudden it's like they have no idea how to use anything.
00:16:54
Speaker
Some people have used Canva and so that's kind of a natural jump from Canva over to show it. If all of this is new for them, they're going to be pretty overwhelmed. So we deliver a lot of video files with every one of our templates. We have a course that people can go through that teaches them how to customize all of the elements of their site. And I use different screen recording software to make those videos and export them and then house them in our course software or we can also hide them as private videos on something like Vimeo.
00:17:22
Speaker
And my favorite right now for that is screen flow because you can even record yourself and your voice and have the screen and you can edit things too. So if you needed to blur something out, like if you're showing them how to put a share key in to show it, you could blur out the share key so they see you do it, but they don't actually get that individual key code.
00:17:41
Speaker
Loom is an awesome tool that we use on a daily basis in our business, but it's more for on-the-fly communication type videos, I think. Yeah, you can't edit it. Well, you can. You can trim it. But it's not as easy as something like ScreenFlow. One thing, just as you were talking about, talking about all the different resources that we have, I was just thinking like, if you're just getting started and you're hearing that, you might feel a little bit overwhelmed. We did not create those resources overnight. And I think one of the best things that you do is just like,
00:18:07
Speaker
especially when you're first getting started, chances are the first day you open your shop, you're not going to be selling at scale, right? And if you are, yeah, that's great. Congratulations, right? But chances are that you're not selling at scale. The gift in that is that as you get questions from people, you can create resources around those questions.
00:18:27
Speaker
So for us, for a long time, anytime we got a new question, we created a new resource around that question. So that when we got that question again, which we almost always do, you know, I think we get very few new questions at this point, right? We can send those resources that we already recorded. So this is over the course of years and years and years that we've been able to create all the resources that we have, but don't feel like you have to create all those things in order to just get started.
00:18:50
Speaker
Yeah, I do think if you're just getting started, you could record like a few like an intro show a video like from your perspective and then for an individual design that you're selling like maybe you make a video for that specific design. And even when you create resources, know that people won't watch them. No, just kidding. You'll get questions and you'll be like, didn't you watch the video? But the great thing is you can just resend that specific video.
00:19:13
Speaker
All right, cool. Well, I think we covered some really good stuff here. Again, these are just based on some of the most common questions that we get around this topic. But I think this is a topic, I mean, obviously, you just know inside and out. And so if you have questions that you would like us to answer along these lines, maybe go a little bit deeper, let us know. We'd be happy to record an additional episode.
00:19:33
Speaker
Yeah, this is fun to chat about. Yeah, for sure. And as always, if you appreciated this episode, we'd love for you to go to Apple. I'll leave a review there. Really helps for others to find the podcast. Yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks for tuning in to the Brancet Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing, leaving a review on Apple Podcast, and sharing this episode with others. For show notes and other resources, head on over to DavianChrista.com.