Kalo

You can customise Woocommerce in anway you wish - at least in terms of the front-end. The downside to Woocommerce is it's ability to properly organise large numbers of products and their categorization. The Big downside to things like woocommerce is that they generate a tonne of bloated css and JavaScript. In my opinion these systems should not 'infect' the frontend the way they do. They should just produce data that we can reference in the frontend.

The biggest differences will be -
 
Working from home...
 
1. The isolation is a killer
2. You never stop working
3. Its hard to find a life/work balance
4. You have lower expenses
5. You often need to meet clients in cafes
 
Working from an office
 
1. You have more expenses
2. You at least can interact with others (unless of course you intend on working on your own)
3. At the end of the day, you can switch off to work
 
Just a few points to consider.

Depends.
 
For me personally making a distinction between working area and resting place (home) is very rewarding. I'm much more productive and I get more work done when I'm in a working environment (office) and feel very rewarded when I come back home after work. While on the other hand mixing relaxation and work by working and resting in the same room is not as good for me personally. However I feel more creative working from home, especially in the small hours, this is when the creative magic happens for me
 
In business terms unless you are in London or some of the other metropolitan cities, I don't think having an office will make much of a difference. From what I've seen most people in the small town are used to having non-formal meetings in a coffe shop or restaurant and rely on Skype conferences and phone talks for doing business. Apart from that, having personal meetings in excess is never good - wasting time over doing the real work.
 
If I assume properly and you plan to rent an office in Louth, Lincolnshire I personally think this won't make much of a difference as far as exposure and new clients. Morever, I think it will be a waste of money. Unless you are relocating or renting a place in a more populated area.

Wait... so you send him your finished work without any contract bounds or payment?

Yes.
 
Dreamweaver has a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWIG) editor. Unfortunately designing html websites with it can have detrimental final results - i.e. badly written non-semantic and unvalidated html.

Check out my portfolio.

Dizi, this makes sense. But technically speaking is just the contrary to what the copyrig rule states in the IPO guidelines which you linked just two lines above.
 
" After all it's their company, it's their brand, it's their online representation of themselves, so if they want to hire another design company to do some work on the site, or feel they can do it themselves then who am I to stand in their way?"
 
It's their company but your design. You are the owner of your design work. So I'll write it again - they can't do anything without your permission, they can't edit it themselve, neither they can hire a company to work on your design unless they have your own explicit permission.
 
And this is what IPO says just taken straight away from the page you linked. In case you don't trust my words, as obviously some people are skiming trhoug them (unfortunately):
 
 
In your case djdany, since you have created your work with your logo included, they don't really have the rights to iterate your work and remove your logo, unless they have your permission. However if they do that, just simply explain to them these plain copyright standards and I'm sure if they are normal people, they'll put your logo back. If they don't, you are working with people who don't really care about copyright ownership and might as well take them to court if you can prove you are the original creator of the work. Which of course I'm not suggesting, as would be very retarded to take someone to court for a footer logo..but that's theoritically how things work.

There is a tool - it's called communication. It's very strange that you've acomplished a complete project for them and now you are scared that they might remove your credits without notifying you and asking your permission. It sounds like they're not a client of yours but some kind of competition or fraud people you've been dealing with. Such kind of basic understandings should be covered without any contracts.

What you're asking for is custom theme developed in the first instance. This alone will take a few weeks at least as there is a process to go through: initial consultation, design brief, mock up, any revisions made at your request, then eventually your sign off on the design. Then the design will have to be turned into a web page, then into a wordpress theme. That's just the look of the site taken care of. This time will be cut if you want to purchase a ready made template, but this will probably still need a certain degree of customization and tweaking to fit your needs. Plus if you go down this route, Do you really want your site to look like someone elses or if you get a free template that has no exclusivity, looks like many sites?
 
Then there is the sites functionality you require (which with reviews, surveys, voting, social networking integration, linking in with amazon etc - this part in itself could prove problematic as you'd want this linking to happen automatically not manually every time you add a book). this also will take time - and a skilled wordpress developer. Yes, there are plug-ins etc you can use, but these will probably need modifying and/or customising to work the way you want and fit in with the look and feel of your site.
 
You could cut down on development time for your site by hiring a number of people to do this job (or one agency) as its multi-disciplnery (you'd need a designer and a developer who is proficient with wordpress and its plug-ins at the very least - maybe some custom php/MySQL database work) .
It's definitely NOT a "afternoons work" and would take (as a rough estimate) between 6 weeks and 2 months (maybe longer) to complete and that's two guys working full time. It would take longer if you hire one guy who can do both as they would have to work on the design then the development separately. As for cost, it will be in the thousands , rather than hundreds of pounds.
Some web agencies around the world will say "yes we can do the work for you in a week and it will only cost you £200" but the job will be shoddy and you might have to then hire someone to put right what they've done wrong!
So, get it right in the first place, invest some decent time and money into the project and you'll get a good, solid website that will serve you well.
I won't be quoting for this job as its beyond my level, but I hope I have pointed you in the right direction.

Yes — to be honest, I just wanted to capture the traffic for that search term. I have a website for my graphic design studio, but felt that there was a need for something to appeal to someone that wasn't too design savvy wanting a design service to get them up and running. The two websites aim at entirely different audiences. I did note how much traffic the search term collected and I have also made an effort to push 'logo design swindon' up to the top in Google search terms. If it was my only graphic design business I would agree with what you were saying entirely.

I assume by old code he means tables They are useful for tabular information, yep.

And if I waste those on everyone who has a multimillion idea but somehow needs a free website to become super rich for free I'd have 0 free time and no sleep.
if you think your idea can make it get a bank loan or if you're a student yourself a student loan, hire proffessional payed help, if not that just shows even you doubt the idea and that's NOT a good msg to be putting out there.

By profesional web designer do you mean a designer, developer, or both?

Hello Kalvin,
 
As a web designer and developer I can understand your confusion. I've seen how online threads on LinkedIn or other professional forums get flooded with dozens of peculiar offers, very often from "specialists" from abroad. Which is not to a suprise considering the technological barrier today for web designers is so low that every 13 years old can easily claim to be a webdesigner after reading few Photoshop and Dreamweaver tutorials. However the list with proper quality services is quite limited compared to the large number.
 
What I would suggest as a starting point is to prepare a RFP - Request for proposal. A pdf document which outlines broadly what you want to create - all technical information, different type of functions and pages, etc. Keep in mind something - developers who give you an estimate for a project withouth having a detailed information about your project are not any good. A professional developer will give you an estimate and completion dates only once he/she has a detailed overview of your project. By making a RFP you not only define what you want to achieve/build but instantly creates trust and feel for profesionalism on the developers side. As a person running a digital studio I can tell you how many people come to me with requests for projects, just to find later it was only a temporary whim of them. And this usually happens once I had already spent 2 or more working days to prepare a thorough project proposal for them
 
Once you have your RFP proposal you can handle it to the developer and expect a Project Brief/Project Proposal from him. The project proposal should outline very detailed what the developer will do for you in what time, what is the payments shedule, etc.
 
In your concrete case, you want to create a relatively complex dating system, so yes - you understand properly that IS a lot of work on the developers part. Depending on the functions of the platform, I'd suggest that £2000 is a relatively low price for a bespoke system of this kind (especially if the price includes design). A more realistic quote would be £4000-5000. You can potentially squeeze the budget to £2000 if the platform has a very limited selection of functions, so there again comes the need of RFP in which you should define which are Primary/most important functions and which are secondary, thus the service provider can give you an advice of how to minimise the work and the budget.
 
As a rule of thumb, don't trust developers who give you an estimate without knowing your project and don't believe you'd get anything good for a very low price. In the web design field in almost every case you get what you pay for.
 
That being said I'd be happy to discuss your project with you if you are interested. You can find information about my services in my profile.
 
Good luck!

Hello Kalvin,
 
As a web designer and developer I can understand your confusion. I've seen how online threads on LinkedIn or other professional forums get flooded with dozens of peculiar offers, very often from "specialists" from abroad. Which is not to a suprise considering the technological barrier today for web designers is so low that every 13 years old can easily claim to be a webdesigner after reading few Photoshop and Dreamweaver tutorials. However the list with proper quality services is quite limited compared to the large number.
 
What I would suggest as a starting point is to prepare a RFP - Request for proposal. A pdf document which outlines broadly what you want to create - all technical information, different type of functions and pages, etc. Keep in mind something - developers who give you an estimate for a project withouth having a detailed information about your project are not any good. A professional developer will give you an estimate and completion dates only once he/she has a detailed overview of your project. By making a RFP you not only define what you want to achieve/build but instantly creates trust and feel for profesionalism on the developers side. As a person running a digital studio I can tell you how many people come to me with requests for projects, just to find later it was only a temporary whim of them. And this usually happens once I had already spent 2 or more working days to prepare a thorough project proposal for them
 
Once you have your RFP proposal you can handle it to the developer and expect a Project Brief/Project Proposal from him. The project proposal should outline very detailed what the developer will do for you in what time, what is the payments shedule, etc.
 
In your concrete case, you want to create a relatively complex dating system, so yes - you understand properly that IS a lot of work on the developers part. Depending on the functions of the platform, I'd suggest that £2000 is a relatively low price for a bespoke system of this kind (especially if the price includes design). A more realistic quote would be £4000-5000. You can potentially squeeze the budget to £2000 if the platform has a very limited selection of functions, so there again comes the need of RFP in which you should define which are Primary/most important functions and which are secondary, thus the service provider can give you an advice of how to minimise the work and the budget.
 
As a rule of thumb, don't trust developers who give you an estimate without knowing your project and don't believe you'd get anything good for a very low price. In the web design field in almost every case you get what you pay for.
 
That being said I'd be happy to discuss your project with you if you are interested. You can find information about my services in my profile.
 
Good luck!

such a great post, i want to give you a hi5
perfectly understood everything and explained it perfectly. much appreciated! i will be in touch

Tried calling him? E-mails aren't always the most responsive and are fairly easy to ignore. Pick up the phone and ring him directly. Tell him that you've sent him emails and that you're just chasing up all unpaid invoices.

NO - you must use tables for html emails, (with inline styles, no CSS stylesheet and no head section style tags).

In my opinion, you shouldn't *really* be worrying about how this email template looks in browsers. You need to make sure it looks alright at each stage in email clients.
 
Here is a list from Campaign Monitor of the most popular email clients (as of September 2012).
 
According to that, you need to be worrying about iOS Mail, Outlook and Hotmail (I'd need to check, but I think think Hotmail interprets the code, rather than the browser, so what you see in your Hotmail inbox might look different to what you see if you just go to the file on Firefox.)
 
Lewis.

Yes, it's legal. Obviously you might have to consider copyrighted images and content, but this is relatively easy to overcome. What you've described is basically how Google works.