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A comment on Building a Startup: 12 Priceless Tools for Launching Your MVP. Parent comment

Re:Building a Startup: 12 Priceless Tools for Launching Your... by vbtemp on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @09:46AM (#2602534)
I recently got an item from themeforest (just a launching page). Even though it looks rather fancy, modern, etc.. (and I could never have made anything that nice looking by myself), I've found that integrating it into my project and tweaking it to be just right has taken far more time than developing something decent from scratch.
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Re:Building a Startup: 12 Priceless Tools for Launching Your... by tptacek on Tuesday May 31, 2011 @11:50AM (#2603043)
This doesn't square with my experience at all. You must be much better at HTML/CSS than I am (not at all unlikely).

For my part, it takes me roughly two hours to:

* Copy all the static assets to their Rails-appropriate locations

* Take the "demo" pages and get them to display reasonably as Erb templates of a Test controller

* Convert the HTML to Haml

* Move content to layouts/application

* Break each feature in the demo out to a partial

There is no other two hours I can spend that gets me as much UI functionality, so I'm a fan.

I have done this three times, and each time found the work of integrating a Themeforest template to be easier than integrating work from graphic designers.

I am careful to work with templates that are HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and that use a grid framework. I can imagine there are many hundreds of themes there that fail one or more of these checkboxes, and that might thus be a nightmare to work with.

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Re:Building a Startup: 12 Priceless Tools for Launching Your... by danielcrenna on Friday June 03, 2011 @01:45PM (#2617264)
Cosign, I find it takes me the same amount of time to fold in a full theme into an ASP.NET MVC site using Razor. It's all just markup in the end, and whatever angle-bracket tax you're paying for server-side includes. Normally the most time intensive part is replacing paths to statics in CSS and HTML.
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