Re: Theme Design Cost ?
@Marc: Requirements is a pretty vague term itself eh? A requirement could be as specific as “must support IE6” (which would have an impact on price) or as general as “must position us as an industry leader”. So requirements can be about business, creative, marketing, functional, technical or other goals.
The biggest things that would affect price however would be any functional components that BuddyPress doesn’t include out of the box (like Wiki, Document Library, Video Sharing, etc.). Although much of that can be done with plugins… said plugins may still require custom theming and/or some work on integration.
Complexity of design could mean things like Flash. If Flash work is required, that would cost more. If you require a logo or other branding, that could cost more. But I was more thinking of the complexity of the design in general.
For instance, this design of mine took almost a month of design, development, research and testing (it works in IE6 believe or not and is designed to have graceful text-resizing… as all my work is. XYZ is a fake name of course):
http://davidlewis.ca/solutions/
While this very simple “design” (a freebee for a volunteer organization) took only 2 hours from zero to WordPress theme (p.s. I’m not responsible for any of the horrible content like the logo sidebar… for instance):
That’s an extreme example… but you get the idea.
