How do you get a nice website design, when you have no idea what to ask for?

bernard

bernard

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Ok, I need to figure this out:

How to buy and hire good design help and get one of those good looking websites with a nice color design and those small details that make you seem legit.

I've been putting this off for way too long, because of.. I don't know, I fear not being able to describe what I want and wasting tons of money.

My problem is I have no clue about visual design.

I can say.. "make something that looks good".

I can choose colors and a logo idea, but besides that I have no idea what to ask for in terms of menus, front page, categories, et etc etc. No clue.

How would I even begin?

It's time to figure this out and learn to work with and hire designers, but I would like not to waste too much money in the process.
 
What's wrong with a nice fast and customisable theme from Themeforest or elsewhere? Custom design is way over-rated in my opinion, at least until you have serious traffic/brand, and even then, most themes you can customise (and keep fast) to differentiate yourself.
 
Darth said:
What's wrong with a nice fast and customisable theme from Themeforest or elsewhere? Custom design is way over-rated in my opinion, at least until you have serious traffic/brand, and even then, most themes you can customise (and keep fast) to differentiate yourself.
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Hmm, good point, I guess it's mostly about speed now, you need something like GeneratePress.

These Themeforest themes are just too massive and bulky to be fast.

I'm also talking about landing pages and such though.
 
I feel like a huge part of this is hiring someone you trust, so that you don't need to worry about your vision as much as trusting their vision, their skills with user experience and interfacing, technical SEO, efficient coding, all that. For stuff like this, you hire the experts and let them do their expert thing, because you aren't the expert.
 
I should rephrase:

How do you find an expert designer, without paying a lot of money?

I've done quite a bit of research and design seems really expensive, particularly with agencies, so you'd want a freelancer, but that's where it gets difficult imo.
 
bernard said:
How do you find an expert designer, without paying a lot of money?
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With great difficulty. "Expert" constitutes they know what they are doing and have vast amounts of experience. By definition that would mean you would be paying above average pricing.

Perhaps look for recently out of work individuals, maybe job boards.

One thing I've found surprisingly, from coding side, is the traditional 3rd world programmer are good, but one guy from West Africa surprised the shit out of me (Fiverr.com), and I had him redo all the code of previous Java coders cause he was so efficient. And he cost very little, probably cause of cost of living where he was at. So it's the old adage you shuffle through 100 to find that diamond in the rough, maybe 1,000.
 
bernard said:
I should rephrase:

How do you find an expert designer, without paying a lot of money?
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Let someone else select and manage them.

If you’re looking for a good value try outleased.com
That’s the closest thing I’ve ever had to a good deal for design.
You can get an international designer (low xxxx per month) with an experienced manager selecting and watching them.

Pretty big chunk of the more successful guys here use them. They advertise their more upmarket hyper6 brand here from time to time.
@HiGHPeR user id.

My next worst idea is kiss lots of frogs on upwork until you get lucky. That hasn’t worked out particularly well for me ever but I’ve heard stories of good deals with persistence.
 
bernard said:
My problem is I have no clue about visual design.

I can say.. "make something that looks good".

I can choose colors and a logo idea, but besides that I have no idea what to ask for in terms of menus, front page, categories, et etc etc. No clue.

How would I even begin?
Click to expand...
Back in the day when I was doing design work, I used to ask clients to list five websites in their industry that they liked the look of and to tell me why for each one. I would also ask them to list three important functions of their website. (This would lead to necessary conversations about why a Flash intro was not necessarily conducive to ranking well in search engines...)

You know what the functions of your website are and have a good grasp of marketing fundamentals but it still might be a good exercise for you to find those five competing websites and think about what you like and why you like it.

(I have sympathy with what you are talking about because there are certain almost intangible things about a website 'looking good' - sometimes it is a question of adding a design flourish to subheadings or a subtle background to certain divs. A lot of it depends on how well you know css. So keep an eye on the little things as you look at other websites.)
 
Darth said:
What's wrong with a nice fast and customisable theme from Themeforest or elsewhere?
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I didn't go with a custom theme, but your comment inspired me to check out Themeforest, and I found Template Kits for Elementor, and now we're talking.

Speed and such a side, Template Kits are cool, because it's much easier to add custom functionality without having to code.

You can simply edit the templates in Elementor and add or subtract functionality.

I then used Jetengine to create dynamic landing page content based on custom posts and I think it looks pretty good honestly.

I'll get a designer onboard to look through it and suggest changes, which I hope is cheaper and more efficient than designing from scratch.
 
bernard said:
I didn't go with a custom theme, but your comment inspired me to check out Themeforest, and I found Template Kits for Elementor, and now we're talking.

Speed and such a side, Template Kits are cool, because it's much easier to add custom functionality without having to code.

You can simply edit the templates in Elementor and add or subtract functionality.

I then used Jetengine to create dynamic landing page content based on custom posts and I think it looks pretty good honestly.

I'll get a designer onboard to look through it and suggest changes, which I hope is cheaper and more efficient than designing from scratch.
Click to expand...
Test your site speed with Elementor and without. :smile:
 
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