Elance Fail

Trying to save on start-up costs by getting a cheaper website? The Risks:

1. The web designer and/or web developer using a template (that your competitors could be using)
2. An extremely unattractive design
3. Dysfunctional backend programming
4. All of the above

If you're at all familiar with the popular freelance/contract website, Elance.com, you've heard the success stories. It's quite rare to hear the horror stories. A close friend of mine, the Creative Director of NovelPoster, decided to test the waters with a web developer he had found on Elance. Being a start-up, NP decided to keep start-up capital to a minimum. He quickly discovered that, cutting corners on the website budget turned out to be a mistake.

"We used Elance and went with the lowest possible price. The project was so simple, just one page, that we figured anyone could do it. But clearly if you want quality, this isn't the correct approach."

NovelPoster had learned the hard way that not all websites are created equally. The result was a single-page layout that was quickly programmed and graphically hacked together.

The Original Design: A Brief Critique

• The typography is like that of a Microsoft Word document
• The layout is rather confusing - note the categories read from top to bottom in columns
• The logo is an eyesore
• The Facebook and Twitter icons are extremely out of place. They are the only graphics on the page with any sort of shading
• The Facebook "Like buttons" aren't actually "Like buttons," but rather links to the NovelPoster Facebook fan page

The Redesign: An Overview

• A much more beautiful font, courtesy of Google Web Fonts
• The column layout was scrapped and replaced with a legible left-to-right layout
• Rather than separating each individual poster in its own box, each category is in a shaded box resulting in a visual grouping effect
• The logo was replaced with a logotype using the new font
• The social media icons were removed completely
• In the backend, the HTML and CSS was drastically cleaned up

Conclusion

Elance is a great place to find good designers and developers, it's not their fault. The moral of the story is:
you get what you pay for.