Ask HN: you want HOW much for the design?

I really like the pay as you go idea. I guess that is agile design outsourcing? I used to attend the graduation portfolio shows at the Art Institute (of Houston, it's a chain), looking for designers that I might work with for web sites. It was depressing for the following reason: On one floor were the graphics arts people, with a stunning visual sense, expressed in physical things like little products, books, magazines, posters, typography, etc., etc. On the other floor were the multimedia designers, whose program required them to do something in every type of techie design there is: Flash, InDesign, videos, web sites, etc., etc. I didn't see the well developed visual sense in the multimedia work, and I'd ask the graphics arts people if they did web sites: "Oh yeah, I did one once." When will these schools wake up and pair the visual sense with the techie in one student? Maybe they should have students work as a team, one techie and one visual. If they could develop these skills sets in one student, we'd see designs like those in CSS Zen Garden.

By the way, what designers have you worked with in Houston? (contact info in my profile)

flipacoin: what is your email so we can contact you to help?

That includes an estimate of the time spent negotiating with the client. I worked as an architectural draftsman for a while, my employer spent at least twice as much time (usually more) negotiating with clients and getting their approvals than I spent producing the drawings. And most businesses are worse, because more people and approvals are involved.

As someone who is a designer/developer who also runs several successful e-commerce websites here are my 2 cents:

Stay away from sites like 99designs and other low budget crowdsourcing sites as they only attract low quality designers who tend not to know much about UX, conversions, usability, perception, etc.

If this project is serious enough for you to quit your job then you really need to make sure your design is going to be flexible enough to accommodate all of the changes you may need to make in order to increase conversions as you begin to acquire customers and analyze data.

Here is my suggestion: the designer should create a design that fits within a CSS grid framework like 960.gs, Blueprint or the Less Framework. The designer can also create their own grid and you can generate the CSS using several online CSS grid builders like the 1kb grid.

Then figure out how many UNIQUE page templates you will actually need (things like a home page, a pricing page, a general inner page that can also double as a blog page - if designed correctly, and a signup page - it's very important to have a flexible signup page that you can easily make changes to).

Most likely you will be re-using elements like headings, paragraphs, sidebars, menus, buttons and lists throughout your site. You can use the CSS grid to build multiple layouts for different page templates or sub-page templates and then reuse the elements and their styles for the content of those pages.

If you need help get in touch. We do a lot of design and dev work for startups and this sort of thing (flexible interface design at a reasonable price) is something we do all the time. Heck, we may even build the templates using HTML and CSS right in the browser and skip the PSD files altogether!

My website is on my profile page. Our pricing is very reasonable and we're located in the U.S. - Detroit, Michigan to be exact.

We might be able to help you.

Senior Axure Experience; Microsoft Business Intelligence Certification; Senior jQUERY HighCharts Experience

Let me know.

Josh