Where to find high quality (affordable) web designers?
-
Hi everyone,
I am looking for find high quality web designers that are affordable. I am open to many options.
There are several things I have looked into.
1. I have looked for designers via CSS galleries, but I don't really know how to get in touch with designers or find them. Rand recently talked about this in a webinar, but if anyone has specific insights on how to find people this way, please let me know.
2. I have also looked into website design contests from sites such as:
I haven't used these services and I was wondering if anyone has experience with design contests.
3. I have looked into the option of hiring a freelancer on oDesk or a similar freelancer site. I don't really know the cost, how to find a good designer, how to avoid inexperienced but cheap designers and all the other such roadblocks that come along with freelancers.
If anyone could provide insight into this, it would be greatly appreciated.
-
Spec work is terrible and undervalues the industry. I say you get what you pay for. http://www.no-spec.com/
-
I think it's about what you want to get and for how much.
It all starts from there.
For example:
budged : 1k - for a 8-10 page website with no complex features you should be able to find good designers.
budged : 300 - for a 8-10 page website with no complex features you should be able to find poor designers that could still do the job.
It's also about luck to find a quality and reliable designer. (depends on background, location, etc)
Hope it helps.
-
Around $500 for now. The project I am working on is a family one so I didn't charge them nearly as much as I normally would.
-
I've always had a great experience with 99designs but you want to make sure you give a lot of requirements and inspiration if you want to get exactly what your looking for. I've only used them for logo work though so i can't give much feedback for other types of projects. What are your price points?
-
Probably best to say where you are based, then get personal recommendations from that area and meet the designer in person.
I can give you great designers in London and I know Luke Jones is a great UK based designer and also contributes to SEOmoz a lot, so maybe get hold of him via DM www.seomoz.org/users/profile/139920
You could try here as well http://www.seomoz.org/marketplace/resumes/service/2 <- people who have tagged themselves with design (altho its a bit spammy)
-
Any insight on the design contests? They seem interesting.
-
Very good points, I will take everything you said into consideration when going into this web development project.
-
Email sent
-
I have had some experience doing this, like when shooting a video, I find an intern at a local TV station who has access to nice equipment and have them shoot some video for me, it worked out great!
I like the reminder!
-
This is so true and what makes this designer recruitment process even harder. Finding that balance and even someone that is near my area that is good.
-
One quick opinion:
We have used a number of developers from eLance.com and have always been satisfied. As with any design project, the more information you are able to provide (in terms of what you want), the happier you will be with the finished product. Most designers will have a portfolio with samples of their previous work.
Prices will vary depending on the scope of the project, time frame, and how experienced/qualified the designer. You can get an idea of what people are paying for different projects by searching the job listings that other people have posted, and how much they are offering.
In our experience, eLance and similar sites are best when you know exactly what you want and the scope of the work is relatively small. Often times those developers are in different parts of the world and communication can be difficult (time zones, language barriers). For large, detail-intense projects, you might do better to find someone local or at least within the U.S. It might end up costing a bit more, but like Steve mentioned "you get what you pay for" and if you end up with a website that you don't like, the money you saved won't matter.
-
email me!
I have an intensive design background, but am fully aware of and skilled in SEO and SEM.
-
You could always check for colleges around your location that offer interns/co-ops for college credit. Normally there is good design talent with relatively affordable prices.
-
High quality and affordable don't always go hand in hand. The whole thing of "You get what you pay for" is usually the case so I'd be careful if it's too cheap. Even if the designs are awesome, maybe their customer service is bad.
Anyway, I'd get a real live person who you can meet with if I were you, instead of a random off a website that you only deal with via email. Design is way too subjective to not have face-to-face meetings in my opinion.
I know some great web designers but they're here in the UK, and not so cheap... but then if they were cheap maybe they wouldn't be so great
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
-
Any new tips on how to speed up re-listing after re-design?
A few things around re-designing an older but well performing site for search and retaining/ improving SEO value. Lots of effort has been put into content marketing and optimising individual pages on this site, it has a lot of links coming in from well-respected sites (but the domain name will remain the same so that shouldn't be an issue) so I'm very anxious about how the redesign will effect ranking, although the new site will be far more user friendly, beautiful, responsive where the old one is not and faster to load. Would really like to avoid the search engine drop when the site first goes live if at all possible- One idea on this was to make the new site live on another domain - .co.uk for example, whilst keeping the old site up on the .com for a month or so, then switching the records so the new site is then visible on .com and the .co.uk redirects to it. Does this sound at all sensible?! Also any more advice on how best to ensure the new site will do better, not worse for search is hugely appreciated. We have cut a lot of content to make it more user friendly and easy to find information. We will be making sure all old links are redirected to new site (but as there are fewer pages on new site, will it matter if 5 old URLS point to one new URL for instance?) Also what's the difference between 301 and 302 redirects! Thank you so much in advance, massively appreciated your time!
Web Design | | Emjmoz0 -
Ecommerce web design read more toggle vs menu link on home page and product pages
Hello, We have an Ecommerce store. We have a lot of content on the home page and product pages and we are going back and forth between which one to use between a toggle "Read More" "Show Less" toggle for each section and a anchor linked menu. We have long product pages We're thinking a read more toggle is more appropriate for category descriptions so that they can go at the top of the category and not take up space. But the read more toggle with lots of content scrolls the page down and doesn't scroll it back up when you hit "show less" We're leaning towards a linked menu for the home pages and product pages for this reason, but an accordion type set of toggles would look nicer. What do you recommend, and how have you set up your read more toggles if they have lots of info so that they are not confusing? Are there other options? ' Not looking for code (I can do that) I'm looking for ideas on the cleanest home page, category pages, and product pages when they have tons and tons of textual content. Wanting to trim it up and make it look compact and neat! Thanks!
Web Design | | BobGW0 -
How to find out that none of the images on my site violates copyrights? Is there any tool that can do this without having to check manually image by image?
We plan to add several thousand images to our site and we outsourced the image search to some freelancers who had instructions to just use royalty free pictures. Is there any easy and quick way to check that in fact none of these images violates copyrights without having to check image by image? In case there are violations we are unaware of, do you think we need to be concerned about a risk of receiving Takedown Notices (DMCA) before owner giving us notification for giving us opportunity to remove the photo?
Web Design | | lcourse1 -
How to find internal pages linking to a URL?
Hey, I had an issue where a client found a bad link on their site then I went to fix it and couldn't figure out where on earth it was. I tried using different software which would find the link, but not tell me where it was linked from. I asked for some help from someone in my office and they found it in about 15 seconds. Their strategy was "think like a client - just click everywhere". Is there a way to quickly find what URLs are pointing to a specific URL? Cheers
Web Design | | renegadeempire0 -
Web Developer Using Stock Photos
Hello, The organization is selling a cms system in a niche market across the country. It has the normal SEO challenges, in addition he is using purchased stock images. This seemed ok, while he was smaller but now we are growing rapidly and these images are VERY STOCK- and well used ( I have checked with Tiny Eye). I remember a few years ago this was a flag to the search engines who went through manual review, is this still true? It seems to me that the theme's that come with the images, are duplicated ( including navigation & footers), so having the duplicated images would be another negative. Thank you for your suggestions!
Web Design | | TammyWood0 -
Comparing the site structure/design of my live site to my new design
Hi SEOmoz team, for the last few months I've been working on a new design for my website, the old, live design can be viewed at http://www.concerthotels.com - it is primarily focused on helping users find hotels close to concert venues throughout North America. The old structure was built in such a way that each concert venue had a number of different pages associated with it (all connected via tabs) - a page with information about the venue, a page with nearby hotels to the venue, a page of upcoming events, a page of venue reviews. An example of these pages can be seen at: http://www.concerthotels.com/venue/madison-square-garden/304484 http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484 http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-events/madison-square-garden-events/304484 http://www.concerthotels.com/venue-reviews/madison-square-garden-reviews/304484 The /venue-hotels/ pages are the most important pages on my website - and there is one of these pages for each concert venue - they are the landing pages for about 90% of the traffic on the website. I decided that having four pages for each venue was probably a poor design, since many of the pages ended up having little or no useful, unique content. So my new design attempts to bring a lot of the venue information together into fewer pages. My new website redesign is temporarily situated at: (not currently launched to the public) http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend The equivalent pages for Madison Square Garden are now: http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend/venue/madison-square-garden/304484 (the page above contains venue information, events and reviews) and http://www.concerthotels.com/frontend/venue-hotels/madison-square-garden-hotels/304484 I would really appreciate any feedback from you guys, based on what you think of the new site design compared to the old design from an SEO point of view. Of course, any feedback on site speed, easy of use etc compared to the old design would also be greatly appreciated. 🙂 My main fear is that when I launch the new design (the new URLs will be identical to the old ones), Google will take a dislike to it - I currently receive a large percentage of my traffic through Google organic search, so I don't want to launch a design that might damage that traffic. My gut instinct tells me that Google should prefer the new design - vastly reduced number of pages, each page now contains more unique content, and it's very much designed for users, so I'm hoping bounce rate, conversion etc will improve too. But my gut has been wrong in the past! 🙂 But I'd love to hear your thoughts, and thanks in advance for any feedback, Cheers Mike
Web Design | | mjk260 -
SEO while designing the website and continuous SEO
What's the difference between SEO while designing/developing a website (ie, setting up a website so it is crawled by search engines) and the SEO that people talk about that needs to be viewed analyzed and changed all the time? I don't have a ton of money to spend on SEO right now but I do want to make sure my website is set up by an SEO expert (if possible) so when I do have money to spend on SEOthe website is set up properly to work with more advanced forms of SEO. I guess I don't understand where you can draw the line (if forced due to money constraints) between SEO in the beginning and continued SEO. What do I need to look for with SEO and the design of my website. How do I get some type of SEO without breaking the bank??
Web Design | | CapitolShine0 -
Ecommerce web site with too many internal links
Hi, We're using Magento CE 1.4.0.1 for our ecommerce web site with a fairly flat navigation system i.e. 9 major categories display across the top menu that when you roll over display 2-20 sub categories (which take you to a groups of similar products) and then individual product pages. The categories and sub categories are available to click on as part of a dynamic Html menu system on each page. Each page also shows a small number of related products. This linking structure seems fairly standard and yet Seomoz throws up the error message, "Too Many On-page links" for most pages on our site. Do I need to really worry about this? Is there much can be done to improve this on an ecommerce web site with a large catalogue of products? I've looked at the Knowledge Base but I don't feel the existing responses adequately address the issue for ecommerce sites.
Web Design | | languedoc0