

Ask HN: How do you do webdesign/frontends when you are a backend engineer? - zytek

TL;DR
As a <i>single</i> founder&#x2F;coder&#x2F;hobbyist how do you do webdesign &#x2F; frontend of a web service you build when all you ever did was devops&#x2F;backend engineering?<p>Long story:
I wish to build a site relevant to my passion (travelling) which I think could also be very useful to other travellers. I wouldn&#x27;t call it a &quot;startup&quot; by who knows - it might turn into one.<p>The issue: all I ever did and enjoyed was the invisible part of web services - server setup and management, deployments, monitoring, performance tweeks. But the core functionality of my &quot;startup&quot; will need a slick and modern responsive web interface. It will be close to impossible to use templates or CMSes like wordpress for it.<p>I enjoy reading about new UI toolkits, JS libraries and CSS helpers. I even built a slick and modern submitting form with PureCSS ! ;-) But no doubt I have no &quot;taste of art &#x2F; design&quot; so I will never be able to do anything close as my friend did with html tables and gifs for spacing 10 years ago.<p>How do you, fellow engineers, coupe with that? I do not want it to block me from working on my project.
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duiker101
you can get some inspiration from websites like themeforest(where you can buy
some nice templates for cheap prices) once you have a theme you like you can
implement that one or just adapt it to your needs but having a base to work on
I think it's important. I understand you, I am a web developer, I can write
css/javascript and anything I need but my taste is terrible. So that is what I
usually do, I begin with a base and start to work on it, adapting, changing,
adding and then I polish the result. It's not the best thing to do but usually
works fine. If I had tons of money to spend I would probably do something
different but since I don't...

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ra
If you're serious about the project hire a designer to create the designs for
you as layered PSD.

It sounds like you should be able to implement them yourself. I work with
designers that are local to me, but you can find some pretty good ones on
odesk.

