
How do you go about hiring a web designer?  How much would you expect to pay roughly?  What if the design fails to impress potential users? - amichail

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comatose_kid
When I was looking for a designer, I called many firms. The end result -
expect to pay 5k-10k for a small site (~10 pages). This was outside my
budget....

So then I tried craigslist. I received a lot of interest, but found only one
good candidate. But this candidate found another contract before I could get
back to them. Craigslist is cool for simpler things like company logos, but
didn't work for me on the web designer front.

So, I contacted a prof who taught a project course at a design school
(university) in my area. I asked this professor to ask his best student to
contact me. I looked over the student's portfolio and was really impressed.
This design student turned out very good work for a very reasonable price.

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rms
www.mintpages.net is a private forum for designers. I've had luck asking for
someone there.

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SwellJoe
Hehehe...It appears one must be a designer to join. Then why would we need a
designer?

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rms
I applied saying that I was an entrepreneur and was interested in hiring a
member. They let me in and immediately instated a rule that you needed 15
posts before you could post in the "Help Wanted" forum.

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zaidf
How do you go about hiring a web designer?

Past custom references, portfolio and most importantly designer's overall
attitude.

How much would you expect to pay roughly?

Too vague to answer...really depends on WHAT exactly you've hired the designer
to do. Is it to take a detailed concept YOU give him and convert it into a
design(cheap)? Is it to THINK through your technical product, think how users
will use it, then design(more work)?

What if the design fails to impress potential users?

I don't know any designer who will guarantee that your users will like the
design so this one is tough.

-Zaid

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waleedka
Here is a good blog post I read some time ago about how this company chose
their designer:

<http://www.barenakedapp.com/the-team/how-we-picked-the-designer>

Figuring out the best designer for your site is, generally, more art than
science. Just like choosing a developer. One thing you can do to reduce your
risk is to hire someone for a small task first (say, do the logo), and if you
like their work, ask them to do the whole project.

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figgy
Hire a designer who has more than a few years experience and it able to
deliver not only the Photoshop files but the front-end (standards-compliant
code!) to you as well. This means this person is able to code by hand and will
understand the implications of his/her design choices when it comes to
developing the actual website. Also, you get kind of a "two fer" this way as
you don't need to hire a second person to do the front-end code. Another
advantage is the capable designer can better communicate with the back-end
team.

Pay this person well as you get what you pay for. Web design like many other
disciplines in the web field, is a highly lucrative job with new opportunities
coming along everyday. It's important for the survival of your own company to
make sure you make the hotshot you hired feel satisfied with the salary and
your company.

However, if you are just looking for a junior person on the cheap, you can
find that but then you get junior, cheap results. It's better to bring in
junior people to work under your senior person and build him/her into a senior
from there.

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zkinion
An un-holy amount will charge out the ass. Many have few clients, so their
business model depends on charging each client alot, almost scamming them.

Web design is not rocket science. With all the tools and stuff available to
designers today, there is no reason the "clothes" of a site should ever go
over a few ,000'.

Don't pay 20-30k. Leave that for big/unsophisticated companies.

p.s. A lot of designers do suck. With developers, many can get the task done
"eventually", but with designers, many can't get what you want... ever.

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cwilbur
Web coding is not rocket science, but good web design is like good
engineering. Good tools will help, but knowing what to do will help a lot
more, and that's what you pay the web designer for. Saying "with all the tools
and stuff available to designers today, there is no reason a site should cost
more than a few thousand" is like saying "with all the IDEs and stuff
available to coders today, there is no reason a program should cost more than
a few thousand." Programmers know that that's BS; web designers feel the same
way.

Unfortunately, it's a lot like hiring a programmer in other ways -- the best
designers will easily be ten times as good as the worst ones, and there's no
necessary correlation between skill and rate.

So returning to the original question: look at the web designer's portfolio.
Ask questions about web standards and (X)HTML compliance, usability, A/B
testing, cross-platform CSS issues, readability, copywriting, audience. A good
designer will understand these things and be able to explain them to you in
terms you'll understand. Make sure you turn on your BS detector too, though,
as a bad designer will try to baffle you with buzzwords.

And one of my favorite interview questions, when looking at a designer's
portfolio, is "Why doesn't Site X validate?" The point is not to get the right
answer, because there isn't one, but to figure out how the designer approaches
these tradeoffs. I've also never interviewed a web designer who provided a
portfolio of only valid HTML and CSS.

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cwilbur
Oh, and how much you'll pay is highly variable. It depends on the job market
where you are, and how saturated it is with competent web designers. A
ballpark of $5K-$10K is not ridiculous, though, depending on the amount of
work.

And what if it fails to impress potential users? Then your web designer wasn't
very competent, because that's exactly the sort of thing he's supposed to
understand about your audience. A good web designer will bounce ideas off of
focus groups and do usability testing, and then when the site goes live will
conduct A/B tests.

Finally, the best way to make sure that the site doesn't impress potential
users is to micromanage the web designer. You need to ask him or her about the
web analytics numbers, but if you insist on wordsmithing on every page and
monkeying about with fonts and layout yourself, you might as well just do the
site yourself. (This is something I've seen repeatedly: the web site winds up
being designed for and by senior management against the advice of the web
designer, the potential users stay away in droves, and the web designer is
blamed.)

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rms
I like this designer and he's very friendly. <http://www.eoghanmccabe.com/>

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SwellJoe
I'm sure he's an absolute gent. But his webpage is nearly unreadable in my
browser. Fonts step all over each other (I'm guessing he's forced line height
to be smaller than the font).

First requirement for web designers I hire: I need to be able to read the
damned page.

