Breaking Free
How to Quit Your Job and Start Your Own Business
How To Get A Great Design For Your Next Website
In: How To By: Brian Armstrong
6 Mar 2009A few days ago I wrote about how you can get a business website built for cheap or free. Several people (correctly) pointed out that you often get what you pay for in these type of situations.
They are absolutely right about that. If you go the inexpensive/free route you can easily get bogged down in mysterious wordpress errors as you try to hack plugins together, or deal with incompetent contractors abroad.
If you are on a budget, then that is the way to go, but it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily going to be easy.
(Note: In my own experience, about 1 in 5 contractors that I use through sites like eLance.com and Guru.com are really good. So my solution is to give them a small project up front to evaluate them before deciding who to work with. It only costs a few bucks each.)
But if you have a little bit of money to spend (and we’re still talking relatively small amounts here – hundreds, not thousands) you can often get a really great design done for you without the hassle.
One site I’ve seen recently who is doing a great job is CrowdSpring.com. What’s unique about this is that designers don’t just BID on your project, they actually SUBMIT a preliminary design as their bid. This is really cool because it allows you to pick from a whole bunch of designers before deciding who to pay.
Right now they only do graphic design, and not programming, but it’s a good start.
Incidentally, CrowdSpring is a good example of a passive income business. They are also doing a percentage based business model similar to what I am contemplating for UniversityTutor.com, where they take a percentage of each booking.
Very impressive site…check them out for your next design project.
- Tags: website design
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Breaking Free is a blog for people who'd like to quit their 9-to-5, start their own business, and achieve financial freedom. It's written by web-entrepreneur Brian Armstrong. You can read more here »
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Steve
March 6th, 2009 at 10:28 pm
That site looks like a lesser knockoff of 99designs.com – but I guess you didn’t have an affiliate link to 99designs, eh?
Brian Armstrong
March 8th, 2009 at 3:30 pm
Interesting, hadn’t seen that one Steve, they both look good though.
Matt Thomas
March 7th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Wow, great advice. I have been thinking about going to elance for some design tweaks. This was very timely for me and I’ll go through here instead.
I also think your advice on giving an elancer a small project first is a great idea. Much better to test the waters first rather than entrust subcontractors you dont know with something very important.
Thanks for the advice!
Brian Armstrong
March 8th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Yep…actually I stole that idea from Tim Ferriss on testing out a contractor. It works though, thanks Matt!
Chris Ferdinandi - Renegade HR
March 7th, 2009 at 8:27 pm
Brian – Just wanted to let everyone know that Nick Cernis from the productivity blog Put Things Off also does website coding for Wordpress. You can get cookie-cutting templates at http://wordprezzie.com or a custom job at his design company, http://goburo.com. I’ve never used them (I’m still using free templates and hacking them for my needs), but the prices are very reasonable, the work samples look great, and Nick is great to work with!
John Bardos
March 8th, 2009 at 12:08 am
Thanks for the link. I was just struggling with a weak outsourced developer. I will try the site.
John
Brian Armstrong
March 8th, 2009 at 3:31 pm
Glad to help John!
Joe
March 8th, 2009 at 2:18 am
I just got through a project on elance and crowdspring. The crowdspring interface is a bit slow and not much fun to browse through while elance has a killer interface. However, I got a much better result with crowdspring (actually FIVE much better results).
For graphics outsourcing, I plan to use crowdspring. For general work and assistance, I am sticking with elance.
Brian Armstrong
March 8th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Good to hear…yep I imagine because you see see so many submissions the design would be much better on crowdspring. Wonder if something like that would work for programming type jobs? I’m guessing maybe not as well, but with some rapid prototyping tools out there (rails scaffolding for instance) it may one day be possible.
Rui Zamith
March 13th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
Hi guys,
This is a very interesting topic, as I’ve many times thought about using a service like elance or guru. Fortunately, I’ve always been able to solve any issues that I came across in terms of web development, however, soon enough I will be needing the help of a pro.
I have heard good things about odesk.com as well. CrowdSpring looks amazing, but it’s like you say, design isn’t enough for what most of us need. If they’re that good, for sure the system will develop to a more global service.
About the incompetent freelancers that you’ve mentioned, well.. the idea of asking them for a simple and cheap project is great, perhaps the most interesting option if the budget isn’t that high. The feedback systems that we can find on guru, for example, are also extremely valuable. One thing I could suggest Brian, is that we could use a section of your BreakingFree Forum to post our feedbacks in terms of web contractors that we may be using.
All the best,
Rui, London.