I tried, I really did. I spent about 20 hours over two days with my eyes fixed on that godforsaken WordPress theme editor page only to find myself back at square one this morning. I have decided to develop a site about backpacking in Africa on my Wanderstruck domain and have lots of ideas, but little know how. This has meant that I’ve flushed some serious time down the toilet while attempting to bring my ideas to fruition.
If I were just going for a standard blog I would be ok. I can do that. But I would much rather the site act less like a blog and more like a guide, with a blog as a small add-on for when I start my travels on the continent next year. I want to use WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) for the first time, rather than sticking with HTML like I have with all of my other sites. I have everything clearly laid out and know exactly how I want the site to work but it’s all stuck in my head and I don’t have the skills to get what’s in my head onto the web.
That’s where Mike from Blog Theme Machine (soon to be Made by Guerrilla) comes in. He shot me an email last month after finding my blog on some list of making money online blogs. It was pretty much an unsolicited sales pitch offering a redesign of Nerdy Nomad for $500. Normally I would delete this sort of thing but the email was nicely written and I replied that I didn’t want Nerdy Nomad redesigned, thanks anyways and good luck on your projects. He replied ‘no problem, thanks yadda yadda yadda’ and that was that.
Well after my bouts with extreme frustration over the past couple of days, his email popped into my head and I went to his site to check out his work. Good stuff and $500 seems like a fair price so I emailed him to see if he could make WordPress do what I want it to do for Wanderstruck and it turns out he can.
After wasting two full days on nothing (I don’t even feel like I learned anything helpful) I think I’m beginning to see the value in spending a bit of money to free up my time for doing the things I’m good at. It will take Mike a fraction of the time to create a much better site than I would be able to make and, more importantly, it will free me up to work on other things. This is the first time I will be spending any significant amount of money on a website, actually. It’s sort of a big step but I’m really excited to see what Mike can come up with. I will write more posts as the creative process begins to try to give an idea of what is involved in having someone else do work for you.
What do you guys think? Is it silly to spend $500 on a custom theme when I could stumble and bumble my way through and make a semi-decent one myself? Or do you think that freeing up my time to do other things makes spending $500 worth it?
if you feel that your time is more valuable so that you can focus on other things, then it it totally worth it
although sometimes struggling through it, you learn more, especially about the ins and outs of wordpress, its advantages and disadvantages
Drafternoon.com originally started on a wordpress blog back in April, but within a month overgrew it, currently joomla (www.joomla.org ) is meeting our growing needs of hiring columnists and distributing a lot of content on various levels
we tried at least 6 different CMS systems, and although I love the simplicity of wordpress, would you, as a user, be willing to dig through a chronilogical timeline of content if you are using it as a guide, granted you can convert wordpress’ frontend to act differently then its blog format.
The Theme’s at that site look good, but in the long term, your Africa’s site growth capacity will determine what you need, will it have a 100 articles, or a 1000 articles? which is easier to organize, and or distribute to your users
it is a hard decision. you just have to go with what feels right, either way it will be an experience
Cheers
on one side i’m thinking it’s a good thing that you’re investing, but on the other, you said that you made just over $1000 in june… can you really afford to take half of that to design a website? it doesn’t sound sustainable
I just started using the Thesis theme/framework for WordPress, (it’s part theme, part plugin enhancement) and while it has it’s own learning curve, it makes quickly laying out a functional theme easy, and integrates SEO stuff into the posts, etc.
If you’ve never heard of it, it’s worth a look.
I vote for the custom design. When it comes to something that frees up your valuable time, the expense is probably worth it. The same principle applies to traveling and working, I think. Because I work full time, my time exploring is valuable; if I can pay a fee for a service that increases that time or makes it easier, I will. (e.g., booking a quick airport transfer instead of spending hours trapped on hot, cramped local buses) It takes away some of the fun learning-a-country experience, but if it means I can experience more of the big things, I’ll accept the trade-off.
So, if the new design will free up your time and mental energy for projects that will actually pay, I think it’s worth it. Consider the time you’ve already spent plus the time you will spend getting the design and functionality just so, and figure out how much revenue you could be generating in that time. Is it significantly more? Less? About equal?
Looking forward to seeing the results!
Spending a little money to get a basic structure that you’re happy with and can expand is a worthwhile investment. What I would suggest is learning as much as you can about WordPress so that you can make changes as you need them and don’t need to be dependent on an outside source. The options available within WordPress are great…but they can also be overwhelming.
Look forward to hearing how everything turns out for the outsourcing and for the Africa site. We hope to make good use of it next year
I would look into a premium theme if you want to spend some money. Having a custom theme is great to give your site an individual look, but you might need to also get updates made when WP also updates.
I had a vbulletin theme developed for my forum and it stopped working after I upgraded. The original company was no longer around, so I ended up just using a free theme.
ana @ I agree with ana ‘s thinking that it is little costly for you but i think you have take right decision. Keep going on.
why not just spend like 80 bucks on a premium theme? wordpress isnt hard to use especially since u have php knowledge
Agreed with Matt,
try a premium theme first and use plugins to get the functionality you want…then if you still have no luck try pay for a custom theme.
I think $500 is fine as long as you are getting exactly what you want and it is custom for you. For written content which is essentially blog posts, articles, etc. WordPress is the best CMS especially when it comes to managing other writers. Some huge traffic sites run on WordPress, for e.g. TechCrunch and Mashable. It is way easier and cheaper to get custom dev work done on WP than Joomla or Drupal. Once you have your WordPress theme, it’s easy to slice up into header, footer, sidebars for any custom development work. I’ve discovered that certain CMSs usually do certain things well and not others. WordPress is the best for blog/articles, vBulletin is best for forums. If you try to do all of it through something like Joomla or Drupal you don’t have the best for a forum or a blog or anything else.
Language Dude, VBulletin is pretty horrible for forums. Why do people peddle this myth? If you dislike the default, techy appearance – which is incredibly unfriendly to anyone unused to early C21 forum conventions – it is a monster to theme in any meaningful way and any meaningful change will make it break with every update.
Another thing I’d quibble with is the custom work claim. Yes it is easier to find someone to do the custom work in WP – but drupal hired help will get it done better. Drupal is – I think you’d agree – far more flexible than WordPress?
Kirsty, forking out is worth it if you have more important things to do. However… as you are constantly adding to your portfolio of sites, it may be a good idea for you to learn a CMS soon to spare yourself future expense. Or perhaps form a partnership with a cognoscente?
$500 is fair for blog design.
But if you already know a bit about WordPress then you can get a premium theme like Thesis and create your own “unique design”.
So if you are short on cash, getting a premium theme for some $80, switching over t oit, and then slowly introducing some design changes from time to time on top of the premium theme is the way to go.
I also think $500 is a lot to fork out straight away, at least get a few other quotes. I’m currently working on a site (www.Bariloche-Guide.com) and although I do a lot of design I still believe it more satisfying to take full control and slave away for hours to do something myself. Would you consider other CMS platforms, WordPress is designed as a blogging platform.
There are lots of good tutorials out there:
http://www.noupe.com/php/cms-theming-tutorials.html
and lots of quality design resources:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com
http://www.sixrevisions.com
http://www.webresourcesdepot.com
http://www.css-tricks.com
http://www.webitect.net
Even buying a cheap theme (themeforest.net) and customizing it may be a better option, and save you 50% of your monthly income!!
I wouldn’t spend $500 on a custom design unless I could justify it improving my bottom line. Will I see a return on my investment? Will it get me more visitors, more clicks and more revenue? I think with a blog it’s the content that’s important, not the look. I’d save your money and spend a little bit more time sifting through free WordPress themes to find one that does what you want.
Not to mention… I don’t hire people who solicit me for business as a matter of principle!
Would using a free (or premium) theme and hiring a programmer to develop a custom plugin do what you want?
With so many wp themes out there – many quite customizable – $500 seems pretty steep. But if you see recouping that money within a few months it may be well worth while.
I on the other hand have chosen to spend endless hours over the past few months learning to migrate and configure WordPress MU for our free travel blog site (http://rvblogz.com) and Jerry’s three legged dog blog (http://tripawds.com). We could have shelled out some pretty big bucks to make these happen much quicker, but I viewed it as a valuable learning experience.
That’s my 2.5¢ … good luck!
I agree that 500 dollars seems rather steep unless the guy is really gifted, you could try post your project on e.g. rentacoder.com or similar and see what offers you get.
Draftermoon has a good point in regards to the limitations of wordpress, when I was looking at it I thought it a bid disadvantage how difficult it was to make its urls behave like one wanted it to (but that is only important if one believes in one part of seology), that is to say wordpress seems really stuck on creating its url with chronological numbers in it and one has to use workarounds contributed by fans to get around it, requires installing and finessing.
If you are looking into cms’s I can reccomend cmsmatrix.org for comparing them.
I have myself sent the contractor you write about an email with a question about a website I would like to make. Have not gotten a reply so I’m guessing he’s busy because of this post !)
I thinks that its very nice price for a website design. Design of a blog/site should always be nice and attractive and user friendly.
I agree w/ Matt. I say go with a custom theme for $100 or less and see what you can do with it. Of course if you’re completely fed up with the design process you can go with a custom design but seems like you could put together a nice site on your own.
I think $400 is fair for blog design.
Wow thanks for all the comments! Lots of great points to consider.
@Drafternoon I see it more asa 1000 article type site with contributing writers eventually but I will cross that road if I ever come to it. With a custom WP theme I will be able to make updates and changes myself with the knowledge I have and well commented files. With Drupal I wouldn’t even know where to begin.
To do with the suggestions about paying for a premium theme and then tweaking that… it’s something I considered. I first tried to tweak magazine-style themes though with no luck, a lot of wasted hours and serious amounts of frustration so spending $80 or $90 isn’t suddenly going to make me able to tweak the premium themes, it’s just going to put more pressure on me to get things right so it doesn’t become a waste of money. I’m pretty hopeless with plugins, too. I always seem to get errors.
@Jez I completely agree that working things out for yourself is a great feeling and I’m all for having total control. Unfortunately I have about a zillion other things to do and, while I would love to spend my days fiddling with WP, I always start to get anxious when I think about how my time could be better spent. Especially when I spend a whole afternoon and accomplish nothing and start at square one the next day (which I did a few times).
@Free Wifi Guru I’m with you on the content being most important for blogs thing but this site won’t be a blog. I have had countless people tell me that WP is the thing to use, even if its just as a CMS. Up until now I’ve been sticking with static HTML sites and I want to experiment with WP as a CMS. Because of this, and because of my obsession with creating sites with well thought out navigation, I need it to do some things that just changing the theme style would accomplish. It’s all about structure for me and less about style.
I tend to go with my gut a lot of the time and it never really lets me down so I’m happy with my choice. I guess I can also look at it as an experiement to write about on my blog. It would be something I would be interesting in reading about so hopefully me sharing my experiences with this will help other people decide what to do in this situation. I guess it all depends what sort of product I end up with to determine whether or not this was a good move.
I’m in NYC now and off to check out a cafe down the road with free wifi. I’m going to be drawing up how I want the site to operate and will hopefully get this process all started within a day or two so stay tuned.
Their are so many pros & cons to this it is mind boggling what jumps to mind for me is “how difficult will it be to tweak the site after the work? or will i have to go pay the same person each time i need to tweak something?”
I have ran in to similar things with a shopping cart and choose the go it alone method simply because I don’t want to not know what every character in the code does the cost is a lot of time though……
Now it is done I’m glad I chose this route…….
Neal you actually just brought to mind an advantage of me choosing to do things this way. I’m much better at reverse-engineering things than I am at trying to research and create from scratch through trial and error. It’s easier fo rme to work with cose that is already there than to try to find the code I need. So once this is all done, if I’m feeling ambitious one day, I can copy the files over to somewhere else and take it all apart to see how it works, just like how you started out when you were buying those sites early on.
Funny you mention this because I can totally relate. I am a teacher and have been trying to develop a website that suits my teaching needs. I’ve played around with google sites but it’s just not very flexible. I, too, have considered forking out money for someone to build me a customized, easily modified website, but have thought $250 ~ $300 was more reasonable. I guess when it comes down to it, it all depends on how much YOU think it’s worth it. Don’t forget to get a few quotes to make sure you’re not getting ripped off, but if having a flashy new blog design would bring a smile to your face, save you hours of work, and loads of headaches, then I say go for it!
Kirsty your right this is a great way to learn & the cost is irrelevant if you are going to do it over & over again, what put me off doing the same was the number of files & tables, and the subsequent upgrades when using an out of the box CMS the cart I looked at had 15,000 tables & around 7500 files total, wordpress is not as bad but still a little scary for me.
New template with shop is now live http://www.goldfishcare.org/ still a lot to add and tweak but functional, initial results are promising will know more in a week or so.
A custom theme is a great idea. Although a lot of us can produce something half decent, a custom theme brings a site to a whole new level. It develops trust right away and makes your site memorable.
By the way, someone recently hijacked my top commentors spot. guideshoesdotcom. This person has been doing the same thing on other sites with his network of fashion & jewelry sites. You probably can’t do much about it, but I thought you should know.
Hey I have to throw out as well that the thesis theme is top class and pretty easy to design how you want. Especially making the blog aspect of the site more minimal. It is a lot cheaper and after you get it down you can easily use it on other sites you have. Also the SEO built in is pretty good. I know I am not the first to say it, but the Thesis Theme is great.
Good luck,
Chris
Late comment, having just read your more recent post.
I was wondering which part of the design process had you stuck?
For me, creating the interface for a new site usually flows like this:
1. sketch (brain to paper)
2. Photoshop (paper to pretty)
3. html (pretty to browser)
4. WordPress (or other cms) (browser to www)
and if I try to skip a stage then I end up stuck, trying to decipher two layers at the same time. The photoshop stage is my weakest point. Can’t think how the gradients and bits go to make it ‘pretty’
Which part got you stuck, or do you use a different flow completely?
and, for the outsource-dude – what did he ask you to supply him with to get ‘exactly what you want’?
Just curious
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You were WAY overcharged. A WP template shouldn’t cost more then $75. Next time commission a job on Rent A Coder.