Dear Webmasters, I am currently making a checklist to see how many pages I need to hire a designer work on my website, my project is for Wordpress. Do I only need Homepage, Innerpage, Contact page? Or are there anything else that need's to be done?
Dicking around drawing goofy pictures in Photoshop is NOT web design, no matter how many ignorant halfwits pissing all over accessibility tell you otherwise. It's putting the cart before the horse and a completely back-assward way to build a site... The vast majority of PSD jockeys not knowing enough about HTML, CSS, emissive colourspace or accessibility norms to be designing but two things; it truly takes a giant pair of brass to call PSD's -- no matter how many of them you make ahead of time, "Design". Start with semantic markup of your content or a reasonable facsimile of future content, let the content and the semantics dictate the layoutS you create in CSS, said layouts being elastic, semi-fluid AND responsive. Then and only then do you bring in the PSD jockey to do a paintover -- assuming you even need to in the age of CSS3. Anything else is a bunch of "flash over substance" gee ain't it neat bull that more often than not ends up useless to actual users.
Completely serious -- look at the big success stories of the Internet -- Google, e-bay, amazon, facebook, craigslist -- do they REALLY look (other than googles constanty changing logo) like they have some artist spanking it on the screen? Hell some of them are so hideous they make the average designers (to borrow from Larry the Cable guy) willy shrink in so far it pokes out the other end. (Hey Craigslist, are your ears burning?) There is FAR more to a website than what it happens to look like on the screen some artist is sitting in front of; and in the age of responsive layout the vast majority of the "very pretty design" that's out there is fixed width fixed font illegible slow loading train wrecks that distract from what's ACTUALLY important on a website: Delivering your content to users. In most cases it amounts to little more than sweeping a lack of content under the rug and trying to convince people who don't know any better to fork over cash for vague promises. This doesn't just apply to the graphics people hang on a layout, but the goofy navigational tricks and "gee ain't it neat' scripttardery as well. Just look at 99.99% of the content on pages like TemplateMonster and ThemeForest for stunning examples of this artsy bull in action, since pretty much all of it -- no matter how pretty -- is useless to visitors, poorly written slow loading bloated garbage made by people who to be frank, have no business 'designing' a blasted thing for anyone. They're ALL little more than scam artists preying on the ignorance of others; sadly many of them are unaware of that because again, they don't know enough about HTML, CSS, or accessibility to even open their ignorant traps on the subject! Content of value in a logical document order, marked up semantically, then bent to your will with CSS allowing the content and markup to dictate the layout. Anything else is just asking for a page that won't index well, will be all bounce, and ultimately fail to do what's actually important on a website: Delivering content to users. But most people these days have been packed so full of manure by the 'artists' and marketing scammers they could fill Biff Tannen's car, and are SO unable to separate themselves from "Ooh, shiny" that anything they do is doomed to failure. Really this problem is creeping into every industry as the form over function artsy fartsy nonsense walks through a pile then tracks it all over everyone's carpets. Now, before the peanut gallery chimes in, I'm not saying you can't make it pretty -- but that's graphics you hang one just one of your MANY target layouts and at the end of the day you always have to remember that people do NOT visit websites for the goofy graphics, painful to use animooted bull and even more painful to use navigational asshattery (yes Parallax scrolling, I'm looking at you) -- they visit for the CONTENT; which is why the most important thing in your entire process should be to START WITH THE CONTENT or at the very least a reasonable facsimile of future content. There's a reason most of what people call "design" on the web amounts to little more than dumping a can of shellac on a pile. Any way you look at it the result is still just bug **** on horse ****, no matter how much you polish it to a deep rich shine. The laugh being the code based content first approach is faster and easier to develop, and easier to make changes as requested by the client; but for some reason people seem to like making more work for themselves screwing around with ultimately useless "layers" in some paint program that isn't even a working design and is likely filled with garbage that isn't compatible with semi-fluid elastic responsive design; much less semantic markup and graceful degradation.
ok, so @deathshadow can be a bit hard to swallow. Get over the tone and really listen, he does know his stuff even if he takes it to extreme. consider the different types of pages on your site. You have your home page, and your standard content pages and then your pages with forms on them. Any other types? Do you have calculators or some graphical content? most sites serve up a consistent type of content - and yours is unlikely to be any different. That is a good thing, it makes the setup so much simpler.