Part of our rebranding process for ThirstTees meant a new website. The old one was great, but we felt it was time to step our game up and move in a different direction.
We’re using Shopify as the platform for our store which offers a huge selection of themes but we wanted some slight tweaking done to an otherwise great theme. Just some simple stuff done to the homepage. Cosmetic touches in my mind. The edits seemed simple enough.
I have some coding experience from my days at OSU so I decided to give it a go and quickly found out this was beyond my expertise. That was after a couple days of head pounding. (Mental note to start learning CSS)
Another great benefit of Shopify is the number of resources available if you do want some custom coding. After searching and sending out a few emails, we found a guy for the right price and told him what we had in mind.
A day later he had the edits ready for us to check out. That was easier than I thought! Things looked a bit like how we wanted but not entirely. Emails started flying back and forth over the next couple days with slight edits that needed to be done. Our programmer followed our instructions, but things had looked different in my minds eye.
Some emails included links to “muse” websites, some just trying to explain things verbally until finally we just created what our ideal site would look like in Inkscape and that finally did the job.
This back and forth action only went on for a couple days, and we ended up with a great final product, but a lot of hassle could have been saved if we’d just put together a mock-up in the first place.
A Few Lessons for You
First and foremost, get a graphics editor like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape. I’ve been using Inkscape for a while now and it works fantastic. If I had the money I’d jump to Illustrator, but Inkscape is working just fine.
The learning curve is pretty big and takes some getting used to, but it’s far better than nothing. Besides, you’re going to need one when generating any sort of graphics for your website.
You might be terrible with the program, but at the very least you can draw some boxes and label them for something to give your coder. If Microsoft Paint is easier for you, by all means use that. If you don’t want to use a graphics editor, draw something out on a piece of paper, scan it and send that off. Give them something visual!
If you really want detail and have the money, you can hire a designer from a place like oDesk or 99 Designs. Have them design the look and feel of your site and then send that off to your programmer.
Steps to Web Design on the Cheap
- Find your template
- Decide if any editing needs to be done
- Design a mock-up on your graphics editor or hire a designer
- Send mock-up to your programmer
- Boom! You’re ready to roll
