As we keep harping repeatedly, we again look at the same issue of ‘doing something different’ in this article too. It does not matter in which area of your online business you are trying to be different - all areas are important. Be it SEO’ing or designing or monetizing different ideas give rise to industry standards. When others start to imitate you and follow you, you definitely profit more than earlier! Today we look at web template sites and see how they are trying to evolve to provide more value to users. As usual, for an example we look at Elegant Templates to make your points clear.

Elegant templates markets website templates including flash templates, logo templates, PHP-Nuke templates etc. As is expected from a site of this nature, there are a large number of available templates with thumbnails accompanying each. Each template is tagged to a category so that they are searchable easily. Again all templates have a live demo attached the purpose of which we do not need to explain. The customer can choose to buy the template exclusively which means it is removed from the site o he can buy a single user license.

Coming back to our topic, now let us see what this type of site can do differently to provide more value to its customers. When you visit the site, you find some useful articles on it. Something small but atleast it is something different. Next it is a No Membership site. This means that customers cannot pay monthly membership charges and use the site. This controversial move (practised by a number of other sites too) creates discussions and traffic. You have people supporting such actions or opposing them. You normally do not have people being passive about it. This helps in creating buzz. Another is live support. This also is something new that has started developing over the past few monmths. Earlier how many template sites had live help available for their customers?

Do you know of any website which has gone out of their way to be different? Share it with us and we will acknowledge your input.