Hi all, I'm new so please bear with me.

So basically I'm trying to get together a portfolio so I can start going to businesses and showing them rather than just saying what skills I have.

The problem is that I'm not very imaginative, I can handle the development side but when someone asks me to design a website from blank I have a hard time getting it off the floor. I have a project for a friend that does cleaning but I cant seem to get much onto the page.

Is there anyone that could possibly help please.

 

Thanks, Stevy.

Welcome Stevy.

 

I like you am useless at designing sites building them is easier.

 

Anyway if you have an idea get it on the forum and ask others to critique it for you, this way you'll learn as well as finding some inspiration

Welcome to the forums

 

Always start with content then work outwards from there.

 

In your example of a cleaning site think about what a potential customer will need to make an informed decision to ask about their services. You may not need much, often a list of services and a phone number is all that's needed, there's no need to try and fill the page with uneeded stuff.

Thank you for the input, the cleaning job is an actual project I'm working on for a friend of a friend but I'm thinking just keep it simple with a couple of pages ( home and contact )

but I'm also hoping if I do a good job on this word of mouth will help me in getting a few new projects which is why I'm fretting so much and probably isn't helping.

Also has anyone tried the google web designer beta yet? I'm used to dreamweaver but as a free alternative I thought of giving it a try as I don't have the money for dreamweaver.

This might not go down well in a forum full of designers, but if you can't design a professional site from scratch I would use a CMS and buy a commercial template to use as a starting point. You can then customise it as you want to make it unique to your client's requirements. Join a template club and you'll have access to an ongoing supply of styles and layouts for different business and organisation types.

 

By changing colours, fonts and layouts, all of which can be done easily with css overrides, you can supply a finished product that is unique, on a professionally designed platform.

Yeah I was thinking that if this doesn't go too well that would be my next option because I can still optimise it for the client but I'm hoping that I can get a little bit used to it so I'm a bit of a package rather than just the code.

I'm working on the website at the moment so I haven't had a chance to look but do they do templates on here or is that another website?

This might not go down well in a forum full of designers, but if you can't design a professional site from scratch I would use a CMS and buy a commercial template to use as a starting point. You can then customise it as you want to make it unique to your client's requirements. Join a template club and you'll have access to an ongoing supply of styles and layouts for different business and organisation types.

 

By changing colours, fonts and layouts, all of which can be done easily with css overrides, you can supply a finished product that is unique, on a professionally designed platform.

 

Off topic, but I would like to say there's nothing wrong with your comment. In fact approximately 30% of my clients are people who have started with a CMS and a ready made template / theme and relaised later on that a template doesn't suit their business needs anymore.

 

However there's a limit to what you can achieve with a template. For a start-up business with a minimal budget, it's a good solution, until they grow enough to afford / require a site from scratch

On topic: @@stevy95, not sure if you know this site http://themeforest.net/ but you can find pretty good templates there.

Hope that helps

Thats great, thanks. Will have a look a bit later though currently working through something and if I start looking through templates Ill lose train of though.

Like @@teodora said, head to ThemeForest.

If you don't feel comfortable designing from the ground up, buy a template from there. If you kinda do and kinda don't (this is what I do when I get a designers equivalent of writers block) take some screenshots of themes/templates you like and throw them into Photoshop and create a hybrid of your favourite themes. If you're comfortable creating from the ground up with inspiration, then ThemeForest is probably the best place to be too.

 

If none of those options work for you - grab a pencil and paper!

Please take this advice with a grain of salt as I am a newbie to design.

 

I assume you have the content that you need to make the site but are not sure how to lay it out? If so as mikekaperys said start with paper and draw a few variations of layouts (top nav, side nav, big hero image etc) and choose which one resonates with you. Then look at websites from businesses that sell a similar service, that way you'll know what your up against and maybe you'll notice a few design patterns that you can implement.

 

Keep looking around for inspiration at places like Dribbble/Behance and just keep iterating and hopefully you'll come up with something decent in the end. It all depends how far you want to go with learning design, a book like Robin Williams (no not that one) The Non-Designers Design Book is quite basic but teaches some decent stuff about Contrast, Repetition, Alignment and Proximity (yep CRAP lol) but seriously its a great primer and can be got pretty cheaply these days.

Edited August 5, 201412 yr by mug2k

I do not think lack of imagination is bad (sometimes it is really OK when simple design without excessive things is necessary) but you always can use elements from other sites and apply them to your site. I do not mean copy-paste of course.

I had the same situation - one of my colleagues developed design of icons for apps and he used icon from one of othe app as example. Aftrer that he asked me was it bad or not and I said that he re-worked that icons at all and remained only approximate shape of icons. I think it's OK, cos he spent lots of times doing them and it's his icons

Edited August 12, 201412 yr by asellus