I keep meaning to blog this, but here it how I "outsource" my design. I found a quality designer who is $75 an hour, he does great work and all I ask for from him is a PSD. This is the easiest thing for a designer to create and keeps his time to a minimum. Then I pay a freelancer to turn that into HTML and CSS for about $100-$150 per site, there are lots of people who do this. I use madmarkup (http://madmarkup.com/) because, well, it's my sister. :)
Most of these sites took between 5-15 hours of my designers time, the logos were a separate expense. I am now using my designer to design the internals of my application, we do a couple pages at a time and it has gone really well. I think it's the next best option to having a designer on the staff full-time.
Sorry, I checked out the template and... what? Do you think this is a nice one?
Have you checked themeforest.net. They have some good templates. Look at them. Feel the sleekness and the brightness. Buy one or hire one of the good designers.
For the logo you'll need a separate designer, and that itself can cost $500.
I found the HTML and CSS to be pretty gruesome (no grids, px-specified font sizes, etc.), but for my requirements (looks good, can be plugged into a Rails app with minimal trouble, has a template page with a sidebar) it was more than sufficient.
I ended up redesigning my site's semantic structure last month (moving it onto Blueprint CSS), which necessitated re-writing all of the CSS, but it was still worth it as the theme gave me a solid look and feel to mimic.
Using CSS frameworks is much worse than using px for fonts (unless you care about really old versions of IE). Any CSS framework will litter your markup with purely presentational classes.
I should clarify: I have a handful of Sass mixins that are based upon the Blueprint CSS grid system that I use to define a grid-based layout for my websites. There's nothing presentational anywhere in the Haml.
I don't particularly care about older versions of IE, but some of my clients definitely do.
Another useful aspect to employing Blueprint (I can't speak for 960gs or others) is that it drastically curtails the amount of work I need to do to ensure that my presentation doesn't break in Gecko, Webkit or Trident. I've seen plenty of edge cases (unfortunately, none that I can cite off the top of my head) where Webkit and Gecko work very differently, and using Blueprint smooths those over.
That is an argument against naming in general. 'When one day you will find that your class="product" contains contact information, you might now the part of the answer.'
i think that it is appropriate for a $300-500 custom project. he could've done better, but for a full site redesign at under $500, he could've also done much worse.
I've got to agree, I think this design looks awful, something out of the Photoshop tutorials a few years ago. Spend $1500, and get a decent design professional of Dribbble.com, or similar.
I really respect Patrick, but in this case I think it's clear we differ in taste. To me, that design screams "templated design". Then again, I think Craigslist is ugly as sin, so what do I know?
My experience with outsourcing web design was to find someone I knew who was really good and charges between $50-$100 an hour. He never takes more than 4-5 hours to give me a quality, site-appropriate, custom design for any site I throw at him. One such site is my consultany's website, which cost a grand total of $300 (for the PSD) if I remember correctly.
The design is not my taste, and looking at the designer's portfolio (http://www.gursimran.com/) it does all look a bit dated. (I think some of this is expected with out-sourced design where local tastes and aesthetics differ to 'western' current trends).
So what do the results look like? Here you go:
http://theloungenet.com http://rubyrow.net http://zerkmedia.com http://infozerk.com http://adzerk.com/
Most of these sites took between 5-15 hours of my designers time, the logos were a separate expense. I am now using my designer to design the internals of my application, we do a couple pages at a time and it has gone really well. I think it's the next best option to having a designer on the staff full-time.