as my school loan payment date approaches i sorely wish i had more design ideas to scrounge up out of my skull to make for carrd templates ... its my tiny niche of 'sellable digital content' that actually works in getting me a little side money (i mean like maybe 100-200 dollars a month, i can pretty reliably get abt 1k-2k yearly off it...? that's with referrals and renewals anyway gathered over the 2-3 years i have been selling) but the problem is i think i burned out some years ago and haven't been able to really come up w/layout ideas for it which sucks
especially when it IS an income to me now, minor as it is ... i love carrd, but its limitations are frustrating sometimes to keep things fresh, and readable (especially when the only real changes to the site have been new icons, some fancy backgrounds, and new fonts ... and not yknow, adding customizable individual column bg colours which i requested as a potential feature...). some roleplay carrds look lovely, but i will say one of my driving forces is being pissed at how inaccessible some of them feel (tiny font, etc), but scrounging ideas for templates without feeling like i'm rehashing something that may already exist is a mental barrier that's hard to work around + burnout
i have considered doing custom website commissions but prices for those are like $40 for a whole layout and that's not quite worth the energy vs making a carrd template once and selling it for like 2-4 bucks
weirdly i feel weirder charging for an HTML template even though that requires far more work ... i guess for carrd the work is already done for you, and because it's a very 'drag and drop' website builder, people feel more comfortable paying for the beefy skeleton and doing the rest themselves, rather than getting a website that may be hard to tweak ... and HTML templates are very aplenty for free on their own
carrd entry plan for like 9 bucks yearly is relatively friendly, and its why i dont go above the pro lite plan myself because 1. it introduces CSS/HTML editing which although i do not mind, creates a potential skill barrier for buyers (at the most i'd do like ... a SIMPLE embed for a page doll or like ... a music player) 2. the BUYER then needs the pro plan which is NOT 9 dollars yearly, and limits my pool of buyers outside of a more casual sphere like a roleplayer, or a starting vtuber, or whatever else people use it for (i used to have my full art info on there, all my roleplay carrds are on there, my personal one, etc)
anyway, this is just offloading thoughts, not explicitly a vent or anything, but i guess a sore reminder to continue uploading my carrds to vgen and to maybe continue the template i started with an idea and hope i dont scare myself out of thinking it's too boring (all this to say i was looking at kobo e-readers and sent myself into a brain rabbithole w/thoughts of income haha ... im still waiting on half of my contract payment and it's very frustrating)
if somehow you got to the bottom, have a teeny preview of my next template i whipped up out of sheer inspo haha. obviously its like the most bare bones placeholder stuff rn cause i work the skeleton out first before anything else (i still dunno what i even wanna theme it as; i usually tend to do game characters or media to use official art)
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