Interview with Marc Burdorf, the XpellShop Owner: About his Way to Success
1. Could you explain to people who don’t know, what Xpellshop is?
At first there only was Xpell.com, a very nice website, coded in Swish with 3D animations. It caused a sensation and we got many awards for our website. After that we started creating further websites and then we decided to sell them as templates. In such a way Xpellshop.com was born in 2003.
Xpellshop offers Swish and Flash templates maintaining the highest standards of quality. We specialize in code and design of Swish templates because Swish is much cheaper than Flash and offers the same opportunities to create multimedia websites with nice effects. Our customers are mostly web designers who order our Swish templates, modify and sell them to their customers. It is really fast to buy a professional design and only make some changes in the content.
2. What was your motivation for starting Xpellshop? What was it like in the beginning?
Customers, who want to have very nice individual Flash websites, have to pay really much money. Our idea was to offer them much cheaper. To sell one design for $3500 is not so easy. But to sell a very nice design 10 - 50 times is more likely.
3. What are the core principles you use in your daily work?
It is important to work reliably and create a design that identifies the topic of the template. I also try to code the templates simply, so that customers can modify them very fast. And I make video tutorials to show them how to customize them.
When I create a Swish template, the most of work takes up the design. I try many different colors and positions and only when I see “that’s the perfect design for this topic” I start working and code the template. While coding, I start realizing how to animate it. That’s a growing process and at the end there is a (hopefully) nice template.
