Ellis said:
@Kiran
Probably just for SEO reasons.
404 pages are not good for SEO at all.
I want to know how you gained your customers. Did you rely on ads or was it just SEO?
Harley said:
I want to know how you gained your customers. Did you rely on ads or was it just SEO?
Initially, we sold templates through Themeforest and Wrapbootstrap. Having one of the top sellers naturally attracted leads, which had a high conversion rate.
When we moved to our own website, we relied purely on SEO and sometimes had up to 100k users every month.
Paid ads didn’t work for us, perhaps we didn’t set them up right, and I preferred to avoid investing heavily in something that wouldn’t last long.
I was just about to buy them.
Roan said:
I was just about to buy them.
We refunded all purchases made since last week anyway.
Unprecedented move. I hope you guys gain plenty of attention from this. That’s good karma.
The shift you mentioned in the industry actually started in the 1990s when CGI and SSI took over, allowing websites to offer dynamic server responses instead of just static files. By 2000, various server-side languages like Perl, Python, PHP, Java, ASP, Ruby, and others started appearing, making way for CMS systems with data-driven dynamics and modular templates.
Javascript in the browser also contributed by making front-end dynamics possible.
Static templates didn’t initially account for this dynamism. They were more like static layouts than functional templates.
That’s why your clients kept asking for features that turned your static prototypes into working templates.
@Mal
Did you even read the post? This company started well after that, and all the templates they have are for React and Angular sites.
Justice said:
@Mal
Did you even read the post? This company started well after that, and all the templates they have are for React and Angular sites.
All the templates are for React and Angular sites.
So… are they outdated?
Jordan said:
@Mal
CGI and SSI? What do those stand for?
Common Gateway Interface and Server Side Includes. Ancient technology 
What a generous gesture to the web development community. Open-sourcing 12 years worth of premium templates is impressive and shows how much this industry has progressed. It’s inspiring to see a side project transition into a successful business and now help countless developers. Huge respect for this decision!
Thank you for sharing your story, these templates are really great and I believe the developer community will appreciate them a lot. I run a platform where I share founder stories and we have a developer audience. Would you be interested in sharing your insights with our 3,000+ members? If so, send me a DM. I look forward to hearing from you!
Feel free to stop by and say hello on our forum.
Awesome, thank you for this effort.
Any thoughts on building a community around these free templates?
Great move, my friend.
Congrats! May you continue to help many others!
Your mom made the right choice with that loan!
Thank you for sharing. I’ll take a look later.