How We Did Our Own Website Redesign

If anyone saw what our website looked before, it was pretty atrocious. Pretty embarrassing now that I think about it. We thought we could just go with it temporarily, since we were just building our minimal viable product, but then we talked to some potential customers and they said we could lose a lot of other potential customers because it didn't convey much credibility with our current design, especially since the space, industry and market we were trying to reach had to do with logo and website design.

So we decided to do a website redesign ourselves.  How were we going to do this? Well basically, using the exact same idea and concept behind our redesign marketplace.  We didn't want to do like a design contest where designers would have to do free spec work for us and we could have a bunch of low quality designs we'd have to take hours to shuffle through. Instead, we wanted to have a low number of top designers go in and redesign a webpage we pick.

Since our platform wasn't ready yet, we decided to go do this the manual way.  We chose our How It Works page, because that's ones of the most important pages to us and helps illustrate to our users what we do.  We posted our project on a few other marketplaces and got quite a few bids for it.  We went through the applicants, and based on the ones with the highest feedback and quality designs in their portfolio, we interviewed them.  We asked them what was wrong with our current design and when they do the redesign, what would they do to improve it.  Based on everyone we talked to, we picked the top 3 we liked the most to do this for us.

So once the redesigns were done, whoever we selected as the best one, we hired them to redesign our entire site.  We also paid the winning designer for their one page redesign.  Here's the other thing -- At the same time, we paid the 2 designers that didn't win a discounted amount and had them do a small tweak for us on another page.  So basically in the end, everyone wins.  The winner got paid for their work and was able to have ongoing work doing a complete redesign for us.  The other two also got paid and we got 2 small tweaks we needed done.  Finally, we had a quality page and website designed the way we wanted it to be so that we were proud to show to everyone (without having to wade through a bunch of low quality designs).  And all this, for only $400.