Where to find high quality (affordable) web designers?
-
Hi everyone,
I am looking for find high quality web designers that are affordable. I am open to many options.
There are several things I have looked into.
1. I have looked for designers via CSS galleries, but I don't really know how to get in touch with designers or find them. Rand recently talked about this in a webinar, but if anyone has specific insights on how to find people this way, please let me know.
2. I have also looked into website design contests from sites such as:
I haven't used these services and I was wondering if anyone has experience with design contests.
3. I have looked into the option of hiring a freelancer on oDesk or a similar freelancer site. I don't really know the cost, how to find a good designer, how to avoid inexperienced but cheap designers and all the other such roadblocks that come along with freelancers.
If anyone could provide insight into this, it would be greatly appreciated.
-
Spec work is terrible and undervalues the industry. I say you get what you pay for. http://www.no-spec.com/
-
I think it's about what you want to get and for how much.
It all starts from there.
For example:
budged : 1k - for a 8-10 page website with no complex features you should be able to find good designers.
budged : 300 - for a 8-10 page website with no complex features you should be able to find poor designers that could still do the job.
It's also about luck to find a quality and reliable designer. (depends on background, location, etc)
Hope it helps.
-
Around $500 for now. The project I am working on is a family one so I didn't charge them nearly as much as I normally would.
-
I've always had a great experience with 99designs but you want to make sure you give a lot of requirements and inspiration if you want to get exactly what your looking for. I've only used them for logo work though so i can't give much feedback for other types of projects. What are your price points?
-
Probably best to say where you are based, then get personal recommendations from that area and meet the designer in person.
I can give you great designers in London and I know Luke Jones is a great UK based designer and also contributes to SEOmoz a lot, so maybe get hold of him via DM www.seomoz.org/users/profile/139920
You could try here as well http://www.seomoz.org/marketplace/resumes/service/2 <- people who have tagged themselves with design (altho its a bit spammy)
-
Any insight on the design contests? They seem interesting.
-
Very good points, I will take everything you said into consideration when going into this web development project.
-
Email sent
-
I have had some experience doing this, like when shooting a video, I find an intern at a local TV station who has access to nice equipment and have them shoot some video for me, it worked out great!
I like the reminder!
-
This is so true and what makes this designer recruitment process even harder. Finding that balance and even someone that is near my area that is good.
-
One quick opinion:
We have used a number of developers from eLance.com and have always been satisfied. As with any design project, the more information you are able to provide (in terms of what you want), the happier you will be with the finished product. Most designers will have a portfolio with samples of their previous work.
Prices will vary depending on the scope of the project, time frame, and how experienced/qualified the designer. You can get an idea of what people are paying for different projects by searching the job listings that other people have posted, and how much they are offering.
In our experience, eLance and similar sites are best when you know exactly what you want and the scope of the work is relatively small. Often times those developers are in different parts of the world and communication can be difficult (time zones, language barriers). For large, detail-intense projects, you might do better to find someone local or at least within the U.S. It might end up costing a bit more, but like Steve mentioned "you get what you pay for" and if you end up with a website that you don't like, the money you saved won't matter.
-
email me!
I have an intensive design background, but am fully aware of and skilled in SEO and SEM.
-
You could always check for colleges around your location that offer interns/co-ops for college credit. Normally there is good design talent with relatively affordable prices.
-
High quality and affordable don't always go hand in hand. The whole thing of "You get what you pay for" is usually the case so I'd be careful if it's too cheap. Even if the designs are awesome, maybe their customer service is bad.
Anyway, I'd get a real live person who you can meet with if I were you, instead of a random off a website that you only deal with via email. Design is way too subjective to not have face-to-face meetings in my opinion.
I know some great web designers but they're here in the UK, and not so cheap... but then if they were cheap maybe they wouldn't be so great
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Having a Subfolder/Subdirectory With a Different Design Than the Root Domain
Hi Everyone, I was wondering what Google thinks about having a subfolder/subdirectory with a different design than the root domain. So let's say we have MacroCorp Inc. which has been around for decades. MacroCorp has tens of thousands of backlinks and a couple thousand referring domains from quality sites in its industry and news sites. MacroCorp Inc. spins off one of its products into a new company called MicroCorp Inc., which makes CoolProduct. The new website for this company is CoolProduct.MacroCorp.com (a subdomain) which has very few backlinks and referring domains. To help MicroCorp rank better, both companies agree to place the MicroCorp content at MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/. The root domain (MacroCorp.com) links to the subfolder from its navigation and MicroCorp does the same, but the MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/ subfolder has an entirely different design than the root domain. Will MacroCorp.com/CoolProduct/ be crawled, indexed, and rank better as both companies think it would? Or would Google still treat the subfolder like a subdomain or even a separate root domain in this case? Are there any studies, documentation, or links to good or bad examples of this practice? When LinkedIn purchased Lynda.com, for instance, what if they kept the https://www.lynda.com/ design as is and placed it at https://www.linkedin.com/learning/. Would the pre-purchase (yellow/black design) https://www.linkedin.com/learning/ rank any worse than it does now with the root domain (LinkedIn) aligned design? Thanks! Andy
Web Design | | AndyRCWRCM1 -
I'm doing a crawl analysis for a website and finding all these duplicate URLs with "null" being added to them and have no clue what could be causing this.
Does anyone know what could be causing this? Our dev team thinks it's caused by mobile pages they created a while ago but it is adding 1000's of additional URLs to the crawl report and being indexed by Google. They don't see it as a priority but I believe these could be very harmful to our site. examples from URL string:
Web Design | | julianne.amann
uruguay-argentina-chilenullnull/days
rainforests-volcanoes-wildlifenullnull/reviews
of-eastern-europenullnullnullnull/hotels0 -
AMP vs Responsive Design? Mobile SEO
Hello !! We are developing a new website with responsive design. As is recommended, the idea would be to have a unique site for mobile and desktop, with same content and same url for both devices, using responsive design to adapt the layout depending on the device. My doubt in here is about the AMP pages? If my website has responsive design, perfectly optimized for mobile do I need somehow AMP pages? As far as I understand, these amp pages would be useful if I had different pages for mobile, but this is not the case. Am I correct or am I missing something? Thanks for your help :
Web Design | | AutoEurope1 -
Tips on finding the right Senior Designer / Design Director
Hello Everyone, I manage a fairly large educational website that we are looking to completely redesign to improve the overall site user experience and usability. In the past I, a non-designer, business person, would just roughly draw how I thought the site should look and our developer (who is good, but not a web designer) would just try his best to make everything look profession. Over the years, it has become painfully obvious that we need to invest in more design expertise and move towards a modern, smartly designed website. So my question: Where are the best places to find good freelance designers? I have of course conducted web searches, browsed elance, and asked my network for referrals. However, I am finding that most of the really good ones, ones who have to ability to take charge and lead us through this entire process, and who have at least a basic understanding of SEO principles, work for larger integrated development shops who also expect their people to develop the new site as well. We already have a developer and are primarily looking for the design expertise. Does anyone in the Moz community have any suggestions or even referrals? Thanks! Eric
Web Design | | Eric_R0 -
Who's best but affordable custom shopping cart provider (e.g. 3dcart, big commerce, shoppingcart)?
I'm planning to put up a buy and sell site for shoes where people can upload shoe listings on their own something like ebay.com though we're not the ones who will process the payment. The site we're planning doesn't have a buy/checkout button and paypal integration so it will look like a catalog. We will just add a contact number/email in the product listing so a buyer can contact and personally meet the seller. Let me know if this can be done in Wordpress + e-commerce plugins. I would also like to know if there are custom shopping cart providers that allow Facebook or Twitter login/sign up integrated in the platform. Let me know if this is also possible in Wordpress by adding a plugin. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | esiow20130 -
For a web design firm, should i make a google plus local page or company page?
I have a web design firm located in India, At this moment we are focusing on local clients as the current competition in local market is very low. But in few months we will shift our focus to outsourcing. So I wanted to know if we should make a google plus local page and connect it with my google places account and website or should I make a google plus business page and connect it to website? Our major focus is on seo. Thanks
Web Design | | hard0 -
Site Re-Design - Running old XML site map for 301's
Hi all, We are going to launch a new site design for our current e-commerce site. I have taken this opportunity to change some categories due to keyword research and all old categories will be 301ed to best fitting new category. So I have 2 questions about moving stuff over; 1. I read that leaving the old xml site map running for the first week, would help, because this would give crawlers the chance to run through the site and follow the 301s, which would help pass the juice. How true does this sound? 2. I was thinking of re-writing all category and sub category titles, meta descriptions and on page content. The positive of this is loads of fresh content - but doing this all at the same time with the new site launch might see some major dropping in search ranking. I've identified our top traffic keyword terms/pages, would it be more wise to leave these pages, and change the others, or would the total new fresh burst have a better impact? Cheers
Web Design | | ToxicFox0 -
Meta author. Is it relevant for website design company in its seo?
We don't usually add the meta author in the websites that we develop. I wonder if it would have any positive effect in our seo. We usually add a link in the footer like this "Diseño Web Vigo "(Website Development in Vigo). I am worry about this links. I'm not sure if they are positive because they are in the footer and so the link appears in all of the pages. Besides all these websites we develop are hosted in two different servers, and google could easily think that it is manipulative thing. What do you think? Thanks!!! 🙂
Web Design | | teconsite.com0