Lenguajero Blog

While building Lenguajero we came up against one challenge that we couldn’t solve ourselves…the actual site design. Here’s how we got it done with a $1000 budget.

Design – Cost $888

Neither of us are could described as designers in any sort of context.  We tried contacting a couple of designers we knew back home. They were busy working full time jobs and/or taking care of their families. So how were we going to find a designer who could do just what we were looking for?

The solution came to us when a soccer teammate of Natalie’s, Gayle, suggested we try out 99designs.com. 99designs allows you to run design contests where designers compete against one another to come up with a winning design.  You guarantee to pay a certain amount of money for the contest up front, and then award a winner when the contest is over (usually one week).

Running contests on 99designs was a bit like shooting heroin. When the contests were running we were completely hooked on the site, checking the status of the contests every 15 minutes just to see if there had been any new designs posted.  For our logo contest we had about 105 different submissions, and ended up paying $200 for the logo plus a $59 posting fee to 99designs.

After the success of the logo contest we decided that we would also run a web design contest for our homepage. The cost of this contest was $400 dollars to the winning designer plus a $79 posting fee. Once we had chosen a winner we contacted him directly and for an additional $150 had him design our landing page, profile page, and topics page.

There were a couple of challenges we faced when using 99designs.

1. Hand-holding
Running a contest on 99designs is still work.  There are a lot of designs to grade, and the designers are usually looking for very specific feedback. During the logo contest a graphic designer friend of ours, Ann Deotte, was kind enough to look at every iteration of the winning design, and tell us what she thought it needed in order to become a strong logo.  I would then relay this to the designer and wait for a new iteration. Repeat x 5.

2. Attractiveness vs. Functionality
Great designers will usually have a strong point of view, think of the user experience, information architecture, extendability of an idea, etc.  However, in our design contests most of the designers seemed more focused on getting an attractive design into the contest quickly rather than taking the time to think about these issues (after all you probably don’t want to spend hours on something if you aren’t assured that you will be paid for it).

The contest for our homepage design was a perfect example. We posted a couple of screen shots of what the site looked like at that point in time: grey, ugly, and only semi-functional (i.e. developer designed).  We asked for innovative web2.0 designs, but basically just got cleaned-up versions of what the site already looked like.

Leaving vague feedback like “can you make it… fresher” didn’t work. Instead we had to be very very specific with what we wanted changed. Given our dirth of design skills this was quite a challenge.

3. The language barrier
The world may be flat, but there are still language barriers (which Lenguajero is trying to knock down). Many of the designers, including the winners of both contests, lived outside of the U.S.  The winner of our web design contest lived in Taiwan and never actually sent a communication that was longer than a few words.  He would receive my comments, redo the design, and then quickly send it to me with an email reading “this???”, sometimes missing the mark on what I was asking for.  I believe that this was mainly caused by the language barrier that existed between us.

99designs is completely addictive, good value for the money, and knowing that you will get a design in a week really helps you push forward with a lot of agility.  We are really happy with both the logo and site design that we got from 99designs.  Come check them out at Lenguajero.

HTML & CSS - Cost $125

We briefly discussed doing this ourselves, but only briefly. Having both suffered fits of rage in the past while doing HTML & CSS we decided that we would keep the work atmosphere tranquil and outsource it.

Once we had the designs for our landing page, homepage, profile page, and topics page we used Elance to find an offshore company who could get the HTML & CSS done quick and cheap.  We ended up going with WebAndPeople, based in Hungary.  They did incredibly high quality work, and we had all the HTML & CSS done within 72 hours of sending them the designs. At a total cost of $125 it doesn’t get any easier than that to knock off a big chunk of the project development.

Total Cost – $1013

$13 dollars or 1.3% overbudget  Not too bad if you ask me!

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