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Ask HN: How do you do webdesign/frontends when you are a backend engineer?

1 points by zytek ↗ HN
TL;DR As a single founder/coder/hobbyist how do you do webdesign / frontend of a web service you build when all you ever did was devops/backend engineering?

Long story: I wish to build a site relevant to my passion (travelling) which I think could also be very useful to other travellers. I wouldn't call it a "startup" by who knows - it might turn into one.

The issue: all I ever did and enjoyed was the invisible part of web services - server setup and management, deployments, monitoring, performance tweeks. But the core functionality of my "startup" will need a slick and modern responsive web interface. It will be close to impossible to use templates or CMSes like wordpress for it.

I enjoy reading about new UI toolkits, JS libraries and CSS helpers. I even built a slick and modern submitting form with PureCSS ! ;-) But no doubt I have no "taste of art / design" so I will never be able to do anything close as my friend did with html tables and gifs for spacing 10 years ago.

How do you, fellow engineers, coupe with that? I do not want it to block me from working on my project.

2 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 12.7 ms ] thread
duiker101
you can get some inspiration from websites like themeforest(where you can buy some nice templates for cheap prices) once you have a theme you like you can implement that one or just adapt it to your needs but having a base to work on I think it's important. I understand you, I am a web developer, I can write css/javascript and anything I need but my taste is terrible. So that is what I usually do, I begin with a base and start to work on it, adapting, changing, adding and then I polish the result. It's not the best thing to do but usually works fine. If I had tons of money to spend I would probably do something different but since I don't...
ra
If you're serious about the project hire a designer to create the designs for you as layered PSD.

It sounds like you should be able to implement them yourself. I work with designers that are local to me, but you can find some pretty good ones on odesk.