Ask HN: you want HOW much for the design?

Ever since I read a comment by patio11 a few months ago, I've converted completely to buying ready-made themes for WordPress whenever I want to put up a "sales" site.

Getting 3 themes at WooThemes will run you about $70. Those three themes each come in several color variations too. That means the next 3 times you decide to throw up a website, it should take almost no work (design-wise). WooThemes is really easy to use and customize, and they have good documentation.

This makes throwing up a sales site really easy. Effectively, any time I create an app, the first step is to put up a WordPress site with a WooThemes theme, build up the copy/etc, then copy the design for use in the actual application.

Note: I usually host my sales site on www.MyAppName.com, and have my "actual" application (a Django app) running from a subdomain like app.MyAppName.com. This way, I host my WordPress sales site completely separately from my app, which is easier for me to manage and to not screw up.

I have worked in a few environments that offered products like yours. Visual design has never, ever been a concern of the customers.

Get something like this http://www.webgurus.biz/adminskin2/dashboard.html and focus on your UX and value proposition.

If you find it necessary to redesign do it v2.0 when you have paying customers and let them have a say in what the design should be.

I know there are a lot of template haters on this board and it baffles me because hiring a professional design team to get your initial product out goes against some of the core values this community is built on.

The problem is that a new product should iterate on its design fairly often, which requires a little bit of design-skills.

You should mockup the user experience before you go to a designer or buy a template. I use Balsamiq for this but there are others.

If you're buying a template you'll know what to look for. If you're working with a designer it will communicate your requirements better than words can.

As themeforest.net is already mentioned, this guy shops pages for 19 bucks: http://albertomoura.com/designfor19bucks/

Speaking as a designer, it's simply a case of you get what you pay for. The designers on dribbble are very very high quality, best of the best, well-known names in the industry, so there is a reason why they charge that much. If you can't pay their rate, you aren't their type of client. Besides, I wouldn't start there if you are just looking to get something up. Themeforest or WooThemes is a good option, you can get someone (or yourself) to do minor modifications the psd files to suit you.

My own rate is $80/hr and depending on the job one page usually takes me around 8-10 hours. Don't underestimate the power of UI design...you are looking for conversions, after all. It helps, too, if you do a little research on why and how good design works in your favor. Having that knowledge will give you leverage and prevent you from being overcharged for sub-par work. Best of luck.

http://forrst.me/zhanna/posts

Those designers are for the artist socialite crowd who are willing to pay their fees. You can get it done much, much cheaper and get 80-90% of the quality of a top shelf designer.

True story: At a startup a couple years back, we asked for two quotes for 4 pages. One was $15,000, one was $1,500. Sure, the expensive guy was better, but not that much better.