Web Designer Needed
-
So I feel like I've almost convinced my boss to hire out a re-design for our website (which is SORELY needed.)
I'm at the step where I need to start finding quotes and site builders.
I want a responsive design site built modern and professional... Love the moz site but not responsive enough. My current favorite example is at www.hasoffers.com
Does anybody have any suggestions of where to go?
And as a bonus, if anybody is brave enough to ballpark what a site like this would cost that would be awesome. Doesn't have to be exact or even that close...
Thanks for any advice given.
-
Good ideas Charles, thank you!
I've been playing with Twitter's Bootstrap for a few hours now and I almost feel like that's a viable solution. It's so clean... but it forces me to learn even more HTML/CSS than I planned to.
I'd much rather get a designer involved... my CEO is being a stickler on the finances of this for some reason. Our company is entirely web-based... it's our storefront. Why wouldn't you want to spend money on the face of your company, you know? Anyway... thanks
-
You could go to a Wordpress Theme marketplace like Themeforest and contact the creators of themes you like to see if they will do a custom design or customize a template that you like.
I've heard good things about Dribbble.com as a design community to find top-notch designers.
-
Thanks Chris your site looks AWESOME and is damn near exactly the style I'm shooting for.
Convincing my CEO to fit it in the budget will be another story.. I may be contacting you shortly.
Thanks to all as well.
-
Feel free to check out some of my work, as well shoot me an email and i can give you some numbers!
Chris Pafiolis
Designer (B.Des)
chris@objectifyme.caps. this is a clients moz account thus the name mismatch
-
I have used designcontest.com to get redesign images for a website. That allows me to see design ideas from a lot of people and have the good ones tweaked before making a decision. I have used it about four times so far. Each time I got a design better than what I could have made myself.
If you do this write a really detailed description of what you want and what you don't want.
I use this only for the "look" of the site. We then write the code in-house because I don't want to trust that to anyone else.
-
Go find a college kid who is good at webdesign. I bet you could hire him/her yet for the summer and you could get them wicked cheap. If you only have 30 pages, you'd probably only need a handful of templates/layouts. And since you are going to use a free CMS, you could probably get away with only paying a couple grand.
Good luck.
Mike
-
Mike,
That was very helpful, thank you. It is a small site. Currently sitting at 72 pages but that includes a ton of blogs and support articles which are all easily copied and can be done quickly by myself if I'm able to dump content into layouts. Without blogs and support pages it's more like 30 pages.
More I think about it the more I want to experiment with Wordpress. So I'm going to fool around with it this week if I could just figure out how to install it in a sub-directory... (so far I'm getting nothing but 403s just trying to install... not going well!)
In the meantime I'm going to take your advice and start contacting local firms and requesting quotes. I am in the Seattle area so it shouldn't be too hard to find.
-
Hi Jesse,
It all depends
Depending on the number of pages, the number of layouts, whether they need to write copy, perform usability testing, etc. And depends on the type of platform they are developing on OR if you are going to get a new platform.
The price changes with the number of iterations needed to layouts/design and the time frame you are looking at.
It also depends on whether you have a freelancer or agency do it. Without knowing the complete scope, I would guess somewhere between $50k-$250k if it is a pretty large site. If it is only like 50 pages and you only did a few templates, you could maybe get away with spending $10k-$30... depending on the people you work with.
First, I would look at design firms available in your area. Check out the websites they have developed and contact someone at the company they developed for and ask them about their experience. Do this for a handful of firms. Then contact each firm and ask them for a quote. After you have quotes from firms, go out and ask some freelancers... look at their work... ask for a quote. You will probably have to have some sit down, in person interviews with these people to make sure that they really get what you are asking for.
I know that doesn't completely answer your question, but hopefully it gives you a few things to think about.
Mike
-
Or maybe it's time for me to learn Wordpress, eh....?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Web Hosting and CDN for Wordpress Site Load Speed - Suggestions Needed
We all know that website load speed is more important than ever. While I love the look and feel of parallax and Wordpress, I want to do everything I can to keep the load speed down. I see a lot of conflicting information regarding web hosting services, CDN services and other service (Cloudflare for example). I am looking to hear from those with their own experiences to let me know what they think is the ideal setup for a parallax Wordpress site is as far as which services to use, including: 1. Web Hosting
Web Design | | Gauge123
2. CDN
3. Any other service or product that would help to provide and extremely fast site load time. Thank you!0 -
Web Editing Pricing Quote
Hi all, I cannot seem to get my pagespeed up to the level I want, but I do not have the backend knowledge to fix the following errors listed below. I have played around with this for awhile, and gotten a number of them reduced, but these last ones are beyond me at this time. Any idea how long this would take someone proficient to do? Any idea what the cost would be? I know the ideas are going to be super general, but ball park is what I'm looking for. Thanks! Ruben Remove render-blocking JavaScript: http://code.jquery.com/jquery-latest.min.js http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/themes/kempruge/scripts/custom.js http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/themes/kempruge/scripts/rem-text-input.js Optimize CSS Delivery of the following: http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/themes/kempruge/style.css http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/themes/kempruge/fonts/stylesheet.css http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/sweetcaptcha-revolutionary-free-captcha-service/css/style.css?ver=3.6.1 http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/nextgen-gallery/products/photocrati_nextgen/modules/nextgen_gallery_display/static/nextgen_gallery_related_images.css?ver=3.6.1 http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/contact-form-7/includes/css/styles.css?ver=3.5.3 http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/easing-slider/css/slideshow.min.css?ver=2.1.2 http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-nivo-slider/nivo-slider.css?ver=3.6.1 http://www.kempruge.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-nivo-slider/themes/default/default.css?ver=3.6.1
Web Design | | KempRugeLawGroup0 -
Web traffic tanked, not Penguin nor Panda...I am stumped...
I have had my current website for several years now, and traffic has been slowly building. 2010 = 49 hits a day, 2011 = 71 hits a day, 2012 = 157 hits a day. I target local traffic and local keywords around by business. I have kept up with SEO changes, using Facebook, social media, updated tags, and kept content fresh, added more galleries images, Auth tags & markup. I have 301 older sites that I have run in the past. Then early this spring everything dropped, slowly but surely, now I'm at 90 hits a day SERPS for my main phrase "boudoir photography" us at less than 50 according to MOZ. I have been watching the new Algo updates, and never had any issues because I don't spam article marketing, I don't buy links, I try to keep content fresh, I don't use directories...I designed the site for PEOPLE not SEO. I get major press about once to twice a year, newspapers still don't get links though.. grrrrr I get natural links through gallery shows, events, local blogs, art shows... So I thought it might be over the year I have slowly added too many less than 100 word pages? Media, Bio, Art I combined all into one page. One page with 300+ words VS 3 pages of 100 words. I did a 301 several pages and trimmed my menu down from 11 to 8 to help everything look cleaner and more eye pleasing...I started asking my friends/clients/collaborators for more links with no link text so they are natural...& not just "boudoir photography" Traffic is still dropping... What have I missed? www.bayareaboudoir.com
Web Design | | Squee0 -
How to determine if my site map needs work?
I recently spoke to a consultant at a search conference who took a look at my site map and mentioned it looked like google would have a hard time crawling the site and indexing new pages and changes. I am managing an ecommerce site with a bunch of products, however, I am not an XML expert by any means so i'd appreciate any advice on what to look for in the site map that would possibly be affecting googles ability to crawl/index.
Web Design | | GregWhiteStarMedia0 -
Turning my Design Business site into a site to promote SEO
I need advice on retooling my website for my SEO biz. I have shifted my business model from graphic designer who does websites, to "internet marketing consultant who does graphics too". My main website and domain name is over 10 years old, so I've made the decision to keep it, even though it has no keywords in the name. The name works well for the new business, otherwise. The site has a PR3 and I rank well for small business advertising terms, which gets me graphic design business. I intend to keep doing graphic design, but that is a smaller part of my income. I had considered making 3 satellite sites with keyword domain names to cover my offerings of graphic design SEO, website development, and internet marketing. But am leaning against it for several reasons (that all of us SEO's know) but mainly the fact that I cannot keep up with both working for my clients and blogging on multiple sites and link building for multiple sites. So my question is (you knew there was one coming, right?), what is the best approach to building categories of web development, internet marketing, and SEO into my existing graphic design/advertising oriented website? This is slightly embarrassing to ask as an SEO, but given the multiple approaches possible, and knowing the importance of doing it right the first time, it's best to get an consensus perspective on the BEST approach. My main concerns are the navigation system and the links from the homepage into the site. I have too many pages I've identified as essential to link off of the home page and navigation menus? (Website development, social media marketing, link building, keyword research, pay per click, online advertising, graphic design, brochures, catalogs, Logos, Branding, SEO, keyword research etc.) I've always tried for the ratio of one link off of any page for every 100 words of content. Do I create a home page that is of monster proportions? Do I just have the 4 basic areas linking off the home page then create a "landing zone" of 4 folders and create down from that? I am concerned about URL length as I go deeper with that approach. Or, does it make more sense to have a dozen second-level pages, and not link them all off the home page, and build from beneath (and relying on external juice). Next issue is the nav system. It will be huge. Am I best off just keeping it to 4-6, and creating subnavigation on everypage within the site according to section (PITA)? I've read dozens of blog opinions on how much nav systems do or do not hurt link juice. I've always thought footer links were right next to worthless to pass any juice, but given this situation, does it make sense to make a footer link for each major page (about 20)? Thanks for your opinions.
Web Design | | JCDenver0 -
Need an SEO pro to build us a new fine art website
Hey Seomoz friends My friends and I started buying and selling art 5 years ago. We did it all on ebay. Two years ago I decided to try an attempt at building us a website to further our business outside of ebay. www.originalartbroker.com I used homestead.com software aka intuit to do this. I was able to get a lot of first page results in seo after a ton of work and willing to do a lot more. I'm sure the homestead site slowed my efforts down. I need more power 🙂 What we do. We sell fine art. We are trying to aspire to the leading seller of fine contemporary art online. We will do whatever it takes to get there. Our issue is not our product. Our issue is getting traffic to the site. I only have 175-200 visitors a day. I need better results for the keywords of our artists and inquires that surround them. We have a bounce rate of 70%, average time on site of 1 minute 50 seconds, and a slow loading site that is almost impossible to create individual pages for pieces (mgmt nightmare) Outside of our site we have blogs, squidoo pages, facebook account with 2500 fans, twitter page with 2k followers, youtube channel, and a blog on the site for new arrivals. We have a 200-250 piece on our site at any given time. We add probably ten pieces on average a week. We don't need any kind of ecommerce management software as most of our sales are done over the phone being that it is higher end art. I need a site that out performs my competition. I need to be in the top three when someone types in "leroy neiman" "peter max" and so on. I, with limited knowledge, need to be able to use the software everyday to upload new art as it comes in. I want every piece to have its own page so that I can also add pieces to a google merchant account. When I add new pieces under a certain artists and it creates its own page i want it to create h tags and an url extension for each product as I add them based off the discription and artists name. I would like some sort of blog integration to post our new arrivals as we get them. I would like some sort of customer capture. I am thinking something along the lines of them prociding email, name, and zip code to see the prices on the site. You are the seo pro so you know what it takes. I would like to know what a solution would cost to get us on the ground with more seo power. A site with speed that is easily indexed. It doesn't need to have a lot of bells and whistles. Please look at my site and let me know what you think. You can get an idea from that of what we are doing. Please give me an idea of what you can do and what it would cost. Thank you
Web Design | | forecastedinvestments0 -
Need advice on diplaying content for Search
Hi every body, I am doing landing page redesign(s). Does any body know or can refer a content carousel that can rotate video and pictures? The "site with images" search option result is a compelling reason to showcase pictures if your space competeiveness (showroom, merchandise, etc) can be improved with a strong image presence. here is my main landing page http://www.shearerpainting.com I know there is alot of stuff, and confusing call to action, but I am looking for strategies to clean it up, clear fous on action (get bid, learn more), but allow users to see that they can dig for more content.
Web Design | | johnshearer0