My Experience With Outsourcing Web Design

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2008/03/02/my-experience-with-outsourcing-web-design/

by dood • 16 years ago

44 19 16 years ago

gigawatt• 16 years ago

as always, you get what you pay for.

csomar• 16 years ago

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?

noodle• 16 years ago

i think that it is appropriate for a $300-500 custom project. he could've done better, but for a full site redesign at under $500, he could've also done much worse.

arb99• 16 years ago

It is from early 2008 though, website looks have changed a lot in the past few years.

(but i do think even for 2008 it was out dated)

aaronbrethorst2• 16 years ago

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...)

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.

rimantas2• 16 years ago

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.

lachyg• 16 years ago

I've got to agree, I think this design looks awful, something out of the Photoshop tutorials a few years ago. Spend $1500, and get a decent design professional of Dribbble.com, or similar.

javery2• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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

javery2• 16 years ago

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

dood2• 16 years ago

Any idea what it would cost me for just a homepage going this route?

dotBen• 16 years ago

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).

dood2• 16 years ago

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

JangoSteve• 16 years ago

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

My Experience With Outsourcing Web Design

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