Said It Here

Why is it so hard to hire just a website designer?

Designers and agencies typically bundle visuals together with full web development, making it difficult to pay strictly for custom mockups without building the whole site. This forces business owners into a false choice between repetitive, cookie-cutter templates or trying to cobble together a distinct look on their own.

What people tried

Every workaround mentioned in the threads below. We haven’t tested any of them — and nobody here is claiming they worked.

  1. 1
    Using WordPress and asking an LLM to build the website
  2. 2
    building the website independently with AI or templates
  3. 3
    hiring a web agency to find a balance between custom style and familiar user experience

In their words

Unedited, most upvoted first, each linked to the thread it came from.

It seems like all the websites I see look the same. I'm not just talking about in my space, but in general, they all look super basic, certainly very clean and lean, but they look like corpo templates. It doesn't seem like any creativity went into them.source ↗

People who see my site tell me I should update it, but when they give me pointers, they point to the same sterile sites I dislike so much.source ↗

How can you stand out, if your website looks exactly the same? I don't want to pay for someone to give me what I probably could just copy myself, with an Ai's help and hate anyway.source ↗

So, I'm torn. Do I keep trying to update it myself to my liking? Do I pay someone to try and give me what I like or do I go with some boring, brightly colored, cookie cutter?source ↗

Dr_WhoDo · r/smallbusiness · 10 upvotes

I don't need somebody to build the website, I need somebody to create the design.source ↗

mrSilkie · r/smallbusiness

Where this came up

People with this problem also raised