Aug 05 2009
The Custom Wordpress Design Experiment: Part 1
I decided last week to throw down $500 bucks on a custom Wordpress theme for a site that will live on my Wanderstruck.com domain. The main reasons were to get a site that looks good, does exactly what I want behind the scenes, and to get this without having to waste a zillion hours of my time trying to figure out the complexities of Wordpress.
Another reason was to see what the process of hiring someone to do work for me actually invloves and to share my experiences with everyone, and that’s where this post comes in.
- Step 1 - I chatted with Mike, my designer guy and gave him a pretty specific rundown of what I needed the site to do. The design aspect of things wasn’t important at this stage because my main focus is being able to get the site working as I need it to on the back end. He said he could pull it all off and we agreed to go ahead.
- Step 2 - I transferred $250, half of the agreed price, into his Paypal account.
- Step 3 - I asked him to hold off on starting until I could put together a Word file with fairly specific details of how I wanted everything to work. It turns out that his first step was to come up with a design and layout, so I should have focused more on this at the beginning and worried about the other stuff later. I did include a few screenshots of sites I liked the design of, including images of fonts, headers, footers, image borders and stuff like that.
- Step 4 - Mike uploaded his first draft of the design to an area on his website for me to take a look and, well, it wasn’t what I had in mind. It’s unrealistic to expect someone to read my mind, so I visited a bunch of sites I love the look of, took screenshots, opened Photoshop and cut and pasted my way to a site that was more along the lines of what I was after. Given how important getting the look right is to me, I should have been more specific about this part, especially since I already have avision of what I want in my head. Talk about a hard to please customer, eh? Fortunately I am capable of doing a lot of the design myself. Unfortunately I am paying someone else to do it because I want to spend my time on other things but if I’m going to be picky, I guess that’s the price i have to pay.
- Step 5 - Mike took my comments on board and didn’t seem too put out by the fact that I essentially asked him to start over. He told me he is more clear now on what I am after and I am curious to see what he comes up with for draft two.
For me the design is less important than the behind-the-scene mechanics of the site. I can design, I can’t hack Wordpress so that’s where he comes in. It must be difficult designing for me when I have a clear idea of the site in my head. I am open for new ideas of course but the first draft didn’t really do it for me.
It’s been a very interesting process so far and I’m happy to share it with you. I would be interested in hearing about other people’s experiences hiring designers or coders and whether it turned out the way you had hoped and how you went about conveying a clear vision for your site to your designer.
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If you find a good designer (or for that matter, a good resource of any type ) treat them like gold. My outsourcing experiences have been a struggle…
I think what it comes down to is the same thing you experienced - the requirements and expectations have to be clearly defined in the beginning. And, I think that some people just naturally ‘get’ your vision better than others.
I think this was a waste of 500 dollars. Wordpress is easy to use. You your php knowledge it would take a day to figure out your way around the interface. The coding is easy.
now, you’ll have a really pretty theme when you are done but i think a premium theme would have done the trick.
Ya Marty I think I know where you’re coming from! It’s so hard to have something in your own head and try to have someone else put it into action. No matter how much you explain and give examples, if they don’t ge tit, they don’t get it. I think he’s on the right track now though.
My PHP knowledge doesn’t go beyond being able to insert a changing date for my copyright. I know virtually no PHP, not sure why you would think I This is all less about the design anyways, it’s all that back end stuff I have tried and failed at many, many times and come away without learning a thing. If I was failing and learning stuff it would be ok, but spending so much time on it and then having nothing to show at the end of two days is super frustrating.
If I get what I am hoping to get (a site that does what I want and is designed in a way that I can easily update and change the design to fit my picky ways exactly) then I will be completely happy with spending the money on it. If I don’t… well, lesson learned and no regrets either.
I paid a freelancer to design a landing page last year. It was a mixed bag. I got exactly what I asked for visually but it wasn’t quite what I really wanted on the backend.
The conversion from PSD to HTML left something to be desired. It was a pretty ugly, automatically generated, code/image combination and making changes sucked.
I don’t own Photoshop and Gimp didn’t let me edit the PSD files properly. I was in a hurry to get the landing page up (it was a bit late because of a miscommunication) and the price was reasonable so I let it slide.
I’ll probably stick to Wordpress themes if I do it again but now I know to ask for HTML and CSS and images (instead of the sliced images and HTML that I got).
This is going to be interesting to follow
I have a very good person lined up to do what I call the putting together part of the site this will leave me pretty much free to do nothing but research & fine tunning the cost may jump to over a years income per site but the flexibility & longterm benefits should be worth it……
I think what you’ve laid out sounds like a good start. I wouldn’t worry about the price you’ve paid. It will be worth it. You NEED to TRAIN YOURSELF to outsource more work. And I mean A LOT of the writing on this site. MOST OF IT. Your time will be better spent in an editorial role and it will still have your personal flavor. Your personal priority should be monetization. When I say monetization, I don’t mean annoying ads. I mean keeping your readers happy while you leverage the content to make yourself a viable going concern. It will probably come down to a mix of ads and affiliate marketing, with affiliate products producing most of the revenue for a site like this. I can’t stress enough, how someone like you needs to break yourself of the habit of doing it all yourself. I still do way too much myself. If you want to make a living at this then you have to pay other people do a lot of things that you will just not have the time for.
I agree with Nomadic Matt and believe you may have wasted 500 bucks. Firstly why is it so expensive? You could have put the project up on rentacoder or elance and I am sure you would have got a lot of interest in the project at competitive rates.
Secondly I would rather have spent $500 on a PHP course which might have served you better in the long run.
Still thats pretty brave of you to spend that amount, and will be interested to hear how the investment turns out.
Don’t use Wordpress as a CMS, use Drupal (http://drupal.org).
I agree with Matt and Anthony about wasting 500 bucks. Learning PHP is the way to go if you want a more interactive backend. There are heaps of sites out there offering free code snipplets that you can use. All you need to find them is combining the right keywords in a search. Once you get deeper into this, you will pick up speed because you know what to search for. (It can be a bit tough in the beginning.)
Learning by example has worked best for me.
Look guys, maybe she paid too much for the theme, maybe she didn’t. This business comes down to productivity. If she saved herself weeks of work for $500 then it may well be worth it. Undoubtedly, she will evaluate whether she overpaid or not. Either way she s gaining experience in outsourcing which is vital if you want to do this for a living and not be chained to the computer 24-7. Not only that, it’s the only way she will be able to dominate that niche.
Hi — long time reader, first time commenter — just wanted to thank you for this blog and being so open with regard to your experiences, in travel but also and esp w/re to building sites and generating revenue. I really appreciate that, I think it’s rare–and helpful–thank you!
My first thought here was that you spent too much! WordPress really isn’t a difficult bit o’ software to configure, and you might considering learning it an investment that will allow you to quickly put up new sites in the future. There are tons of good templates and basic customization is a snap, even without PHP.
However, because we don’t know your requirements and requests on both back-end features and front-end design, I dont think it’s possible to say if it’s worth $500 bucks or not… would love if you did post that documentation but, I understand if you chose not to lol.
Good luck with this! Regardless of what happens, you will learn something new. All the best.
:~j