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How much do you pay a web designer?
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And even then, since you have no ability to judge his work, he's going to fuck you in the ass. You just won't realize it.
How do you know that it doesn't crash 10% of the time? That's 100 users out of every 1000 users that you're screwing over. And why would everyone of those users tell you about their bug when they could just not know about your website? Oh, and then there is the whole issue about XSS and SQL injection that a careless developer/designer can screw you on (and a few other attacks as well).
As for looking nice, how do you know it looks that way for EVERY browser? How do you know you aren't pissing off potential clients by horrible navigation (you might miss this since you'll know how to navigate everything). How do you know that the site is efficent for SEO reasons? Could be loosing money this way as well.
There is a hell of a lot to consider with a website besides just "looking nice."
There's a lot more to judging a website than just checking if it looks nice.
Look here's the reality of the situation: You simply can't afford a web coder/designer/savant worth a damn (full time anyway).
Look for unnecessary stuff in your budget and start cutting shit out. Either that or convince more people to give you guys money.
If all else fails, pick up some books, get creative, and start making a website on your own. Go for something minimalistic.
Futility I am constantly going to reemphasize that you need to get a firm, because you do not seem to be able to evaluable talent and payment thoroughly enough to be anything but lucky or disappointed in your new hire. With adequate research you are far less likely get burned with an established vendor than some in-house person, and are also likely to get a better product.
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you can look at a designer's portfolio online and learn everything you need to about the work they do, and if you're still not convinced, you can contact them for references and they should be all too happy to send you information from happy clients in a heartbeat
why would you go to a firm when money is clearly the issue?
You're more likely to get a shitty employee than a shitty vendor with an equal amount of research. Especially if you know nothing about the position you're trying to hire.
That's business.
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It is possible - my last place seemed to have a habit of picking shitty vendors, but then they compounded the problem by making bad contracts. This is the advantage of hiring a firm - you can draft a SoE (Statement of Work)/Contract that spells out exactly what they need to do and the consequences if they don't.
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He said 30k per year, and when you add in payroll tax and benefits you will get an even larger figure.
Which is more than enough money to get a serious web application built. I've seen great things built for 30k by a firm with a 115/hr rate, and they were nothing special.
Thanks for playing, though.
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do you have any idea what you're talking about?
Everything I am saying I have seen done first hand with great success. And yes, by non-profits.
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1. Good website
2. Something OP can afford
Choose one. You can't have both.
Also, like Scooter, I was a web developer for a Computer Science department, and I did template tweaks as my main design work. I was paid 50K NZD, which was a wage well above average in New Zealand. You're asking for money below average for LA, I would bet.
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futility created this thread to see if he was looking for the wrong things with the wrong wage, and you told him he clearly didn't know what he was talking about and therefore needed to hire a firm.
let's say he does. his company hires a firm to build out a website (or maybe even a few) for $30,000. let's say they're really awesome so they get them done in a month and hand them over. they're beautiful and they work great.
so what happens when it's time to update these gorgeous brochures they've just had designed?
who gets to edit photos and put them up?
who creates the graphics for the front page?
who writes the copy?
who formats and posts this information?
who tests this across multiple browsers and OSs? who QAs it?
now, let's say that you actually do have someone who can do all this, and the company you've hired has even been clever enough to design your site inside a CMS, like wordpress, for example. you can update the content of the page to your heart's content. but your business moves locations, and now you have to update your static files and includes wherever there's an address. who gets to dig around in wordpress to find all the places this change needs to be made?
and worse, what if they've set up the website in a CMS like drupal? an extraordinarily powerful and common choice for business websites -- with an insanely high learning curve. who teaches the folks at the company to use drupal? who teaches them how to manage the modules and create new ones? I wouldn't even know what the hell to do with a drupal installation.
moreover, what if the company who designs it isn't hosting it? what if the website has some kind of bizarre technical error -- the mysql starts fucking up for some reason, and they have to get on the phone and call somebody? boom, you're back to paying the firm a firm's rate.
you are advocating exactly what he stated he no longer wants -- a "pretty brochure". websites are a living thing that must be maintained, and to do that you must have someone around whose specific domain it is to maintain it.
this is a terrific idea.
plus, for $30 an hour, you will likely get someone who is twice as talented and efficient as the guy who's working for $15 an hour (imagine that), and so you lose nothing, but gain quite a lot. I'd go with this.
It's silly of us to even discuss this!
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Is this just a quick and dirty job or something long term? I was at a place with shitty patchwork web applications/sites and the maintenance is many many times worse than getting it done correctly in the first place. One application ballooned into 3 full time "Developers" just to maintain it. It was horribly buggy, inefficient but the business became dependent on it. That one app costs more YEARLY to maintain than it would have to get an off the shelf enterprise product.
Im going to go ahead and agree with Jasconius... With a 30k/year budget, you could probably find a really talented firm to handle your site... I mean, lets say, for sake of argument, the base initial site costs 20k dollars to develop... To me, that seems excessive, but whatever. Im also assuming you have a basic corporate brand and everything already set up, so the actual "design" aspect really is just in terms of site layout and what not. That leaves 10k/year for whatever. Im assuming you are going to be doing some basic work after that yourself, considering you have at least one other person whos job at least partly entails website maintenance. You could have your outsourced firm set up a system where you can do basic content revisions internally, and call them back in to do major design work (site rebranding, major content overhaul, whatever).
I mean, really, unless your site has some sort of contantly revised content, you really shouldnt need someone on full time to do this. Of course, i have no idea what your company does so maybe you really do. But hiring an outside design firm wouldnt mean you have to constantly be paying them because they wouldnt constantly be working.
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Additionally you if you advertise it right. (point out the flexible hours) you will be able to probably snag a freelancer who would like the guaranteed 20 hours a week and then have a bit more room in his week to pickup side projects. This makes it more attractive to them as well because you can tell to come in whatever hours as long as they get the work done.
I mean using Kate for an example she is far more likely to drop her rate from 35 to 30 because she is guaranteed over a thousand hours of work over one year and it continuing.
Satans..... hints.....
I'm always willing to drop my hourly a bit if there is the assurance of hours. There is something to be said for steady income.
I don't think $30/hr is going to buy an incredible freelancer for the job you are asking for him to do.
The OP has already stated that he has gotten burned by vendors before, so I fail to see how he will be more inclined to go with a freelancer since he is more likely to get burned with less recourse.
I think the best approach might be a synthesis of these two opposing views.
Bite the bullet, hire a group of savvy professionals to give you the foundation of a reasonable web presence, and then hire some fresh out of college graphic designer with some cursory web skills at a low rate to do your content updates for you.
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I work for a non-profit too, and we had a similar situation with our database. We needed software that did a whole bunch of things that no out-of-the-box database management software would be able to do.
We used a firm, and in our contract stipulated a bunch of solutions for the problems you've listed above, and we negotiated it at a pretty low rate. If you have some foresight, you can address all of those problems at the beginning and still be within budget.
And btw, when it comes to drupal, it's really not that hard at all for an end-user content-updater to update content, if they set it up correctly. The thing is designed to be easily-updateable by non-drupal/html/prgramming savvy folk. New modules, of course, are a different story all together, but why would you need to make any if the original firm did a good job?