Paying extra to have web-based software applications branded to match your core website exactly, is overkill. More importantly, it is not cost effective.

Our Citizen Space product is sold with basic theming functionality. You can have your own logo, and the colour of the page headings can be changed to match your colour scheme. Due to the elegant, neutral design of the product, this is enough to give a sound match to a client’s core branding.

In the past
We have occasionally performed an extensive re-design of Citizen Space for a client. The initial extra cost for this increases the price tag by approximately 35%.

Fast forward to the present
As standard, Delib offers clients the option of an SLA. This SLA covers things like upgrades and critical fixes. We roll out a new version of Citizen Space roughly bi-annually, adding new features and improvements to usability.

Get to the cost
So for a standard Citizen Space client, an upgrade rollout takes approximately 10-20 minutes. We recently performed upgrades for two of our heavily themed clients. These took an average of 2.5 days for skinning and Quality Assurance. That’s 2.5 days of real cost, charged to the client.

Why?
All Citizen Space releases are fully QA’d. This means they support all major browsers, and are fully Accessibility tested. For a standard Citizen Space, these tests need to be done once, then applied to every standard client. The cost of this is spread across all the clients. For a bespoke skin, all these tests need to be run again, and fixes made. There is the real cost.

Upgrade time (hours) for upgrading a Citizen Space with standard theme (including client logo and colours) versus a fully customised theme

Conclude me something
If you’ve got bags of money, or you expect huge volumes of traffic to your app, then paying around £3000 a year to keep your custom theme up to date and accessible might be a good idea. For any one else it’s simply not cost effective.