The New Approach Hiring Designer For Your Website

Not all of us were born with designer skills but many of us want their sites to look nice and professional. This is where we get to dilemma of hiring designer for our web site. I’ve just went through this “hell” and want to share with you the new approach that I’ve used and that indeed worked for me. But before let’s look at the old way of hiring the web site designer.

Old Way Of Hiring Web Designer

I ran through this last year when I was working on eCommerce project for the client. I’ve set up shopping cart platform, entered products and it was time for design. My client wanted something “special” although he didn’t know what exactly he wanted. So I went to Craigslist, paid $20 and put up an ad. Right away I started getting tones of proposals from all around the world (mostly from India of course). My client wanted local designer so I picked around 70(!) candidates for review and eventually picked the one that looked the most professional for the budget that I had.

Then the hell has started. My client has made the deposit, designer started working. I was passing requirements between my client and designer. Designer was submitting drafts. My client didn’t like those since he wanted something “special”. Designer reworked and submitted drafts again. Eventually it ended up that designer spent so much time that she started asking for more money. My client was like “What did I pay the deposit for?”… And the  project just failed.

New Way Of Hiring Web Designer

I’ve heard about 99Designs a couple of times and all good stuff. So I decided to give it a shot. Here is why I call it new way. With 99Designs you run the contest. Designers from all over the world start to participate submitting their drafts based on your requirements. You are free to ask participating designer to change something and they’ll be happy to make a change for the chance to win the contest. The only catch is you have to deposit money upfront to the special escrow account. If by the end of contest you pick the winning design these money will be transferred to the winner in exchange for the design source files. In worse case of scenario you’ll loose only $39 listing fee and get your money back.

Here are few things you need to be aware of to run the successful design contest:

1. Write as detailed contest requirements as you can. Include URLs of web sites that you like. Check other similar listings first to see how others write the requirements.
2. Don’t listen to 99Designs suggested prize for your contest. They put it the way high. For example they suggest to put $600 for web site design and you could get it for $300. The reason they put it so high is they charge %10 of the winning prize. Also check other contests that have already ended to see how much people paid.
3. Communicate with designers who participate in your contest. This way you can ask them to change something. Plus other designers will look up the comments and have a better understanding of what you want
4. If you don’t have logo design run the separate contest for it first. And then run a contest for the web site pages.
5. Note that the final outcome of the contest is one or more PSD files. Don’t expect to get your design in HTML/CSS format. This would be separate project that requires skill that not all designers have. I’ll write another article on this soon.

I hope this info will help you getting your design done. I had very positive experience with 99Designs. Please share your experience.