This post is actually inspired by this book. I haven’t read it yet but the idea of telling a story is very much to my liking.

I’ve decided to make a quick search on website templates providers’ slogans as this is a short variant of the story they tell to make me purchase with them.

This is what I found…

Template Monster – Delivering the Best Templates on the Net!
Sounds cool… I believe that it’s really is so but… They deliver the best templates on the net to WHOM? To me? To my competitors? To anyone on the Web? I don’t feel the personal touch with this message.

Template Heaven – the Most Powerful Design Solutions!
Cool too! But! Tell me that you are interested in me as a client of yours! I don’t want to hear the stories about how great you are. I want you to tell me how cool I’m when using your products…

Design Load – Professional Design Centre
So professional design centre is here… I’m tired of saying ‘cool’… Professional design centre… but where am I with this center. Tell me about me to make me stay with your company.

Design Galaxy
They do not tell a story! Will never get back to them!

Boxed Art
Another one poor story of no story!

4 Templates – Your Template Resource.
It seems to be the best story I’ve met with website templates providers… It tells about the templates and about me! Happy with the slogan now but wonder why they are not number one with such a perfect story… Should try out their product (never yet). Maybe this is the problem?

Or maybe the story company tells is not of such importance with website templates industry…

Template Monster has released 5 templates for osCommerce 2.2.

osCommerce template from Template Monster actually includes all the files needed to set up osCommerce on-line shop. Besides, there’s a PDF with instructions on how to set it up.
Template Monster promises to add one new osCommerce template on a weekly basis.

As for me I dislike the way they look like. I think that Template Monster has all the potential necessary to produce osCommerce templates of really great design. Why not use the potential???

I’ve agreed on the interview with Dieter Andries CEO of TemplateHeaven. It will appear next week.

Till that time feel free to drop me your questions james4www {at} gmail {dot} com if any…

I’ve received it from Gordon. Thanks to Tom I’ve noticed the invitation. Well… Here’s what I’m “hearing�

Total Volume

• 16.5

Last CD Bought
Paradise Lost – Paradise Lost

Song playing right now

• Tom CRAFT - Loneliness

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

• TOOL - The Patient
• de phazz - hearfixer
• manson – mOBSCENE
• the music - freedom fighters
• incubus – drive

Five People to Whom I’m Passing the Baton (hope they want kill me for this, as I’m not a fan of chain mail but this one is special)

• Tom
• Jacob
• Rich!
• Cameron
• Lim Chee Aun

Template Heaven has some changes with its website. Now it has 4 featured template with the home page. It seems that the site works now but not all the parts of it.

Affiliate program (they offer 40%) does not work actually (I have 404 page)… I think that they’d better offer to subscribe to a newsletter notifying when the affiliate program will be on.

I’ve contacted them asking for an interview. I think it should be rather interesting as Template Heaven has the potential to compete with Template Monster (I mean the quality of their templates mainly).

Will see what the results will be…

Template Monster added a new category “Most Popular Templatesâ€? last week.

Currently there are 1198 templates. With this category the template with 6 or more downloads are shown. I think that this category will be of great help for those who look for inspiration at Template Monster.
I would not recommend buying a template from this category unless you plan to customize it much.

Template Monster’s team has managed to restore its positions with Google.
It’s #2 for ‘website templates‘, ‘web templates‘, and #3 for ‘flash templates‘.

But the site was unavailable for couple of hours today, not sure about the reason though… some hosting problems or what?

del.icio.us is a “social bookmarks manager”.

I’ve checked TemplateMonster.com, BoxedArt.com, BestTemplates.com, and 4templates.com there.

TemplateMonster seems to be most popular there. It was bookmarked by 58 users. The rest of the sites I’ve checked are not bookmarked at all.

Veer’s has appeared with royalty free photos. The gallery is not very large but it has some interesting shots.

press release says:
“From a design perspective,” says Sheldon Popiel, founding partner and Creative Director at Veer, “We appreciate the subject matter and artful compositions of these images. They’re sophisticated, relevant, and useful…”

I’ve managed to find some info on the new owner of CSS Vault at last.

He states that CSSV won’t go commercial though some shifts into it can be noticed with the new design of the site (check out the previous post).

Besides, I do not think that he’s bad at investments I’d rather think that he’s evil…

…check the comments on ‘Who am I?‘ to get what I’m talking about.