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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