

My Experience With Outsourcing Web Design - dood
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/03/02/my-experience-with-outsourcing-web-design/

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csomar
Sorry, I checked out the template and... what? Do you think this is a nice
one? Have you checked themeforest.net. They have some good templates. Look at
them. Feel the sleekness and the brightness. Buy one or hire one of the good
designers.

For the logo you'll need a separate designer, and that itself can cost $500.

Just my opinion. What the HN crowd think of it?

~~~
aaronbrethorst
I'll second your recommendation of themeforest. I needed a template for my
portfolio site (<http://aaronbrethorst.com/>) a couple months back, and found
a pretty decent one for $22 (twicet: [http://themeforest.net/item/twicet-
business-portfolio-templa...](http://themeforest.net/item/twicet-business-
portfolio-template-5-in-1/47846))

I found the HTML and CSS to be pretty gruesome (no grids, px-specified font
sizes, etc.), but for my requirements (looks good, can be plugged into a Rails
app with minimal trouble, has a template page with a sidebar) it was more than
sufficient.

I ended up redesigning my site's semantic structure last month (moving it onto
Blueprint CSS), which necessitated re-writing all of the CSS, but it was still
worth it as the theme gave me a solid look and feel to mimic.

~~~
rimantas
Using CSS frameworks is much worse than using px for fonts (unless you care
about really old versions of IE). Any CSS framework will litter your markup
with purely presentational classes.

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jules
Who cares? This is a serious question.

Pixel font sizes are bad because they might not scale correctly, but why are
presentational class names bad?

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rimantas
When one day you will find that your class="green" is displayed in red, you
might now the part of the answer.

~~~
jules
That is an argument against naming in general. 'When one day you will find
that your class="product" contains contact information, you might now the part
of the answer.'

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javery
I keep meaning to blog this, but here it how I "outsource" my design. I found
a quality designer who is $75 an hour, he does great work and all I ask for
from him is a PSD. This is the easiest thing for a designer to create and
keeps his time to a minimum. Then I pay a freelancer to turn that into HTML
and CSS for about $100-$150 per site, there are lots of people who do this. I
use madmarkup (<http://madmarkup.com/>) because, well, it's my sister. :)

So what do the results look like? Here you go:

<http://theloungenet.com> <http://rubyrow.net> <http://zerkmedia.com>
<http://infozerk.com> <http://adzerk.com/>

Most of these sites took between 5-15 hours of my designers time, the logos
were a separate expense. I am now using my designer to design the internals of
my application, we do a couple pages at a time and it has gone really well. I
think it's the next best option to having a designer on the staff full-time.

~~~
leftnode
Who is your designer? I would certainly like to hire them for some work.

~~~
javery
<http://atimcalledoak.com/> \- but he isn't taking any more work right now, I
am keeping him busy.

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JangoSteve
I really respect Patrick, but in this case I think it's clear we differ in
taste. To me, that design screams "templated design". Then again, I think
Craigslist is ugly as sin, so what do I know?

My experience with outsourcing web design was to find someone I knew who was
really good and charges between $50-$100 an hour. He never takes more than 4-5
hours to give me a quality, site-appropriate, custom design for any site I
throw at him. One such site is my consultany's website, which cost a grand
total of $300 (for the PSD) if I remember correctly.

<http://www.alfajango.com>

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dood
I posted this because I was curious what people thought of the Elance
approach, as I am looking to get my homepage redesigned.

I made an Ask HN if anyone has recommendations for someone on a tight budget:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1552745>

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dotBen
The design is not my taste, and looking at the designer's portfolio
(<http://www.gursimran.com/>) it does all look a bit dated. (I think some of
this is expected with out-sourced design where local tastes and aesthetics
differ to 'western' current trends).

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gigawatt
as always, you get what you pay for.

