I’m a solo developer creating my second online business. For the first one, I did all of the backend and frontend work. However, for my second business, I need the site to look really good, so I plan on working with a designer. As it stands, I’m almost done with the backend, and am happy with the overall structure/flow, but I’d like to bring in someone else for the aesthetics.
With that said, this would be the first time that I work with another person in development, and would appreciate any advice in how to create a workflow that would maximize our joint effort. My initial thought was to just upload the site to a webserver, then give my designer access to all of my View files (it’s a php app which follows the MVC architecture). Does this seem like a reasonable approach? Or might there be a better way to go about it.
I too am a solo developer after working with a local designer. He would design the site for me in illustrator and then i would code it and make it come alive. However, I was constantly following up with him, reminding him of my commitment and hurrying him. Great designer but off the wall and lacked priorities.
So I took it upon myself to learn Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop via Youtube tutorials. I guess you can say that I am a graduate of the university of youtube. I subscript to Illustrator, photoshop and graphic design YouTube channels.
My workflow now is the following.
1 ) I go through hundreds of templates @ website template sites. Until I find something that inspires me and I screen shot it. The idea is to give me an idea of a layout.
2 ) I identify the user interactivity that I want the site to have.
3 ) I create it in Illustrator. I use the Google Material Design specs. I pick the 2 major colors from the customer’s logo and then use Material Design Color Palette generator to determine the color scheme of the site. I use a 12 grid system in Illustrator.
I guess i am now very good at it since I now wireframe the layout by hand in my moleskin notebook.
4 ) I use the Foundation Zurb framework to make the site responsive. I work in Webstorm 10 on a local server with MAMP.
I have never heard of anyone ever doing the design after the coding.
Please feel free to contact me directly via my sitepoint contacts page.
I would recommend starting with a home page mock-up and moving on from there. The home page is typically enough to establish an overall theme and layout that can be carried through to the rest of the site. If that isn’t enough than choose significant inner pages and have those mocked up as well. The home page itself should have separate mock-ups for desktop, mobile, and tablet. Only once the design(s) are approved should you start allowing the designer or yourself to theme the site, providing access to files.
I hadn’t thought about having separate desktop, mobile, and tablet mock-ups; and I like the idea of having the homepage designed (and approved!) before moving inwards.
I appreciate the very detailed response. I fear, however, that I know my visual limitations, so I think that using a designer is probably the better approach for me. (Though, the Google Material Design link was very interesting!)
I’ve had experience with Designer but not by choice. I’ve tried to convince my boss that I can do the design using Pre-Built Javascript UI libraries. Certainly, I won’t be able to customize 100% for client’s liking but I’d say about 98% which is more then good enough. The developement time reduced dramatically since I didn’t had to create UI from scratch. If you really want someone to handle the front-end, I would get someone with JS experince + Pre-built JS Frameworks like ExtJS, Bootstrap, and etc… I would only hire Graphic Designer if he/she has great experience in improving on User Experience. I honestly feel Graphic Designer jobs will be obsolete. Just google ‘Web Design Templates’, pick few designs you like and mash them together.
Take a look at that link. That’s just from 1 of thousand sites that provide UI templates that costs less than $50 (usually $10).
Thanks for the link! And, I’m comfortable doing all of the js stuff myself as well. Also, I was planning on hiring a designer who has had experience using Bootstrap (though I just started playing around with it myself, and wasn’t aware of the wrapbootstrap site…). Perhaps a combination of doing some of this stuff myself, and having a designer do the extra 2% would be one way to go.