You may have noticed that our blog design is pretty simple. Sadly, neither of us are designers but we’d like a good blog design. So we had an idea: why not have Suresh find us a wordpress designer in India?
We also thought this would be a great way of bringing to life the excitement - and challenges - of using an offshore assistant. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be writing detailed installments about this process - including some input from Suresh. We hope you enjoy - and if you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to send them our way!
The first (obvious) step in outsourcing our blog design is to find some designers willing to participate in our bid process.
We’ve decided to keep our requirements pretty simple and broad - we don’t want to spend a ton of time defining exactly what the designer should do. Instead, we’re looking for a designer who knows what she’s doing and is exercise creative license to create a theme that incorporates tinker toys and the idea of “life experiments.” We think that te details - e.g., exactly what tinker toy images to use, whether to use photos or to create renderings, where certain buttons are - should be left up to the designer (assuming we can find a good one). That’s certainly not our area of expertise.
Our first idea was to have Suresh locate wordpress designers in India. We figured that he would have local knowledge that would enable him to quickly find some quality designers. more…
The early results of Suresh’s work weren’t all that promising. Which got us thinking - we know designers here in the U.S. that might be willing to design our blog for us. Is it possible that they’re cheaper when efficiency is factored in? Also, we wondered what kind of results we could get from rentacoder or elance. The Wall Street Journal had recently run this article, where it claimed to get a pretty good personal website designed and running for $125 by a programmer through rentacoder.
We received a reply from Claudia to our request. She was surprised that we managed to find her and she was still quite eager to do the blog redesign.
However, since we’re new customers, she still wanted to go through the rentacoder process. This was a bit of surprise to us, as we had assumed that protections like escrow and adjudication existed to protect the buyers. When our best offer was “please send $100 via PayPal to start”, we rather appreciated the idea of escrow, however we had been willing to take a chance on Claudia since she had a lot of great samples and understanding trust in an outsourcing relationship is really part of the experiment
We’ve received several mockups from Claudia, and she’s been taking our feedback and incorporating it very quickly. Here are some samples from the first batch of ideas that she sent us:
Note that she created these based only on the instructions “we want it to include tinker toys as part of the theme” and “we kind of like the orange on the site now”.
Stay tuned…