View Full Version : Are there any people that actually work in real web design?
I was going to title the thread "...work in real web design anymore?" but frankly am not sure now if anyone ever did.
I've been looking for someone to help me re-work my website for almost a year now, and it's been one dead-end after another. I don't think I'm asking for a lot, but I am constantly contacted by guys who are "web designers", which really means "I download a Wordpress template from the interwebs, install your pictures, and charge you for the favor". Or, they get carried away with graphic-design and fluff crap that is of zero use to anyone but their own ego.
On top of that, I'm looking for someone local so that I can get some face-time, but no dice there either. You would think that with literally 5 million people in the tri-county area down here SOMEONE would know SOMEBODY that does this kind of thing.
I've been down the path of "I'm your buddy, I can help you" before and that's a dead-end road. You can't yell at a "buddy" who's giving his time freely. I don't really want to yell at anyone but I do want to establish deadlines and have people live up to them (which, from talking to some friends that have been down this path, is a nightmare. getting deadlines met by web geeks seems harder than home-improvement contractors). The way to do that, IMHO, is cash. Pay to play. You give me functioning website, I give you money. Hell I'm even willing to pay in installments.
I think Google Sites looks promising, and it's supposed to be DIY, but every time I go on there it's just more technobabble to learn that I don't have time for. I have also found a few alternatives to Wordpress-type systems, but again I don't have the time to learn them or, more correctly, figure out which part I need to learn to do what I want to do. I know enough about Wordpress to know that it sucks for what I want to do.
Anyone have any tips on how to find a good web-development person that's more than a graphic artist? In fact, I'd prefer no graphic design at all. What I'm really looking for is a good techno-geek to help out this gun-geek. :D
variablebinary
03-17-11, 08:38
You're going to be in for a challenge.
Why? The nation has become savvy enough where people tend to confuse their rudimentary techno skills with being an IT expert.
Best advice is to view samples of previous work, and if you see something that looks inline with your goals. Get a reference for the cited example and if everything sounds right, lock in a price and timeline.
rickrock305
03-17-11, 09:04
My wife can do anything you need. And we're local to you. I'll PM you her contact info.
rickrock305
03-17-11, 09:07
rob, tryed to PM you but it wouldn't let me because your inbox is full.
Hi Rob, same here, email sent. I've been developing full time since mid 90s.
Yes, there are actually still web designers out there. I don't do it, but I do run a small hosting business and know a few people who do do it and are quite good.
Good luck. If the other leads don't work out let me know and I can make a couple referrals.
I stopped designing web pages once I realized there wasn't that much money in it and people wanted jack of all trades who'd design and code. I don't code.
I stopped designing web pages once I realized there wasn't that much money in it and people wanted jack of all trades who'd design and code. I don't code.
Coding as in... layout? Or coding as in server-side functionality? There's a ton of money to be had in server-side applications and scripting.
Coding as in... layout? Or coding as in server-side functionality? There's a ton of money to be had in server-side applications and scripting.
As in I was a front end designer, I figured out everything from the UX to then the UI and content design. The minute it had to function on the server side I raised my hands and let someone else do it.
I got out of web design and now spend my time designing UIs for consumer products, I think mainly because I wanted to end the soul-sucking horror of web design.
Clean out your inbox Rob!
Sent you an email. My company no longer does stuff full time but we may be able to help you.
We do Flash, Flex, Drupal, we even do CMS.
I stopped designing web pages once I realized there wasn't that much money in it and people wanted jack of all trades who'd design and code. I don't code.
+1, although i was leaning toward flash at the time.
I stopped designing web pages once I realized there wasn't that much money in it and people wanted jack of all trades who'd design and code. I don't code.
That's been a strength here, being able to do both. It's kept me quite busy.
I stopped designing web pages once I realized there wasn't that much money in it and people wanted jack of all trades who'd design and code. I don't code.
You're in the marketing field, you should know there's a ton of money in it :P, a decent converting landing page for a large brand can easily run $15-20k add ad spend management fee's and you're talking six figures. Maybe not as great as just buying millions in media and just charging a 20% fee :D
Is there money to be made as an individual working for other individuals, not much, a decent front end guy with some back end knowledge could probably do $50-70k a year if he or she knows how to cold call.
Edit:
Rob WP is pretty standard any more for CMS, we've used it on large sites, it's not just for blogging. Some of the largest sites online use WP. And stay away from flash, Jquery is all you need for any "special" crap. Flash is limited and makes for a shitty UX.
I got some encouraging email from some members here. Thanks for that.
re: wordpress, I don't care who else uses it or what else it's used for, I've worked with it and it sucks. It is for either stream-of-consciousness "I just took a big fat shit and it looks like Tom Hanks" blogging or static pages. For a page like mine it is utter crap. Tons and tons of people buy Oly too. :no:
I got some encouraging email from some members here. Thanks for that.
re: wordpress, I don't care who else uses it or what else it's used for, I've worked with it and it sucks. It is for either stream-of-consciousness "I just took a big fat shit and it looks like Tom Hanks" blogging or static pages. For a page like mine it is utter crap. Tons and tons of people buy Oly too. :no:
LMAO, it's a CMS. Any one who knows basic php can make it do anything they want, it can be a shopping cart, a blog, a content site, a video hosting site, a porn site etc etc lol. Hell you can make it into a match.com clone if you want.
It simply allows for rapid development instead of having to work from scratch. When a client needs something here at work (we don't have months to turn things around, they need to fall in place with other channels) we use WP and our own admin built on WP.
WP isn't an oly, that's just one's ignorance showing ;P Just because you don't understand it don't knock it. That's like calling sugarcrm crap because you didn't pay for enterprise support and it "doesn't work for you".
For your site you could probably use WP right out of the gate, you simply need to create a few page templates and understand the difference between posts and pages, and add a plugin for the menu.
You can add a different template for the layout on each page if needed for links etc. You simply upload the file to your includes director and choose it in the drop down when creating the page.
If you have some one do something "custom" they're going to go on sourceforge.net or somewhere else and download open source do some tweaks and charge you an arm & leg, if you find some one cheap they're going to charge you $1-2k an than give you a pile of shit 3-4 months late after a ton of asking for updates, than vanish when shit breaks.
Here's some reading material http://net.tutsplus.com/?s=wordpress
But, at last I no longer work on WP or any of that stuff, I'm a CD so I just get the stress on managing "creatives". But when you're a small company starting out you need to know how to do everything. Thankfully we're no longer that small company :)
rob_s I feel your pain. I cant tell you how many "web designers" I have wanted to choke the life out of. I'm hiring you for your expertise but leave the prima donna shit at home. Yes I know you can do this, Yes I know that things look better this way. However I have a REQUIREMENT for X Y and Z. Either you can or can't do it. Don't try to bullshit me into doing it some other way because your skill set is limited or you don't want to work on something that isn't cookie cutter.
You're in the marketing field.
Actually no, I'm in the product design field. i.e I no longer work on 20-30K turn and burn web projects, and now work on projects that actually mean something. Helps me sleep at night not knowing I'm contributing to horrible interaction design, and make no mistake about it, 99 percent of websites are awful interaction design. :mad:
If "CMS" means "Can't Make Shit" then I agree, it's CMS.
If "CMS" means "Can't Make Shit" then I agree, it's CMS.
Content Management System
Actually no, I'm in the product design field. i.e I no longer work on 20-30K turn and burn web projects, and now work on projects that actually mean something. Helps me sleep at night not knowing I'm contributing to horrible interaction design, and make no mistake about it, 99 percent of websites are awful interaction design. :mad:
Lol our stuff converts extremely well, we generated over 20 million on cyber Monday for one client alone, a 98% increase from the previous year. Our FB CTR's are over .4% on average (incredibly high) and our cost per fan is around $.2. On PPC etc we regularly outperform our competitors, not sure I would call it turn and burn, when in one PPV event our turn and burn converted to over 120,000 orders.
We do billions of ad impressions for top brands (not spam, that would be to easy) yearly and we always meet our goals or exceed them. Hell we get white-labeled by a lot of the bigger outfits.
We have invested millions in to analytic & metrics suite, and a number of big brains expanding on it.
So I kind of take offense to the turn and burn... :P
And I'm not a salesman (account manager :rolleyes: ) so I don't have to talk all professional and shit, I get to rant :)
But yeah we've been featured on a number of publications, the best is probably techcrunch, I know they're just a blog but they still have a great following of industry leaders and make our business spike.
Let me explain my aversion to wordpress, as it typifies one of the challenges I've faced in trying to get the site cleaned up in the past, which is that tech-guys may not be writers, and tech-guys can get bogged down in tech and forget the actual point.
My objection to Wordpress is the tedious data-entry page. Currently I use Google Docs for all my writing, including magazine articles and even some of my longer posts here. From a writer's perspective it is nearly perfect. It has the basic controls a writer needs (italic, underline, bold, font sizes, font colors, tables, and outlines) and makes uploading pictures easier even than posting them on a forum. Insert picture -> from file -> browse -> resize on screen. Done.
Because Google Docs works like a word-processing program it allows a writer to go back, edit, view things as large as the monitor will allow, see more of the document as a whole, is uncluttered with buttons on either side, data-entry windows, etc. From a writer's perspective these are work-flow issues and time-saving features. I enjoy writing, but I don't want to clunk through some techie problems to do it.
To make an analogy, as shooters we've all seen guns or accessories that were designed by non-shooters, and to the engineers and techies it's had all the right features and on paper seemed to tick all the right boxes, only to be completely useless in use. This is Wordpress for me. God man, the "edit post" box on these forums is more user-friendly than Wordpress. (and believe me, I've considered changing my site into a forum that is read-only just because it's an interface I'm already familiar with).
This is the page in wordpress that is it's total undoing for me. I hate this ****ing page with a passion and would like to see the person responsible for it poked repeatedly in the eyes with a hot poker. On the one page where I have admin control the idea of updating content using this interface makes me want to hang myself.
:suicide:
http://foliovision.com/images/2008/04/wordpress-edit-post-allow-comments.jpg
http://thesocialmediaguide.com/2009/04/26/how-to-publish-from-google-docs-to-your-wordpress-blog/
Might be outdated but a number of ways exist to link of your wp and google docs :)
This is what makes WP so powerful, it's contribution based, people have a problem, they build a solution and they share it.
I had heard this too, but nobody has been able to tell me how to make it work, and the first two comments in your link (the two most recent) say it doesn't work anymore.
I have also heard that it may be possible to interconnect google sites and google docs, along with my personal web address (and the development of google sites may well be why they disabled the wordpress feature in your link) but again, nobody to verify it and set everything up. I just don't have the digital mind to get through this stuff and every time I start down the DIY path I want to throw the computer in the canal.
I find it hard to believe that in this day and age there are not options available, and people to pay, to make this work.
In truth, if the sitebuilder tools from my web host were a little bit better/more flexible I probably wouldn't be bothering with this at all, but, while they are better than the Wordpress interface (and even have wordpress as an option), there are many shortcomings of that system as well.
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