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What are you willing to pay for?


Jessi

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We all want to be experts in every field, but truth is, sometimes there are people who are better at doing things than we are.

 

So when it comes to your site, what are you willing to pay someone else to do? Would you pay for a theme, for example, or do you prefer to build it yourself? Would you have someone else do the logo design?

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I pay for anything and everything that I'm not an expert with.

 

I'm great with the database and back end functionality, but when it comes to design or advertising they are people that are far better at it than I am. So I pay them to get results while I stick to the rest.

 

Gotta spend money to make it :)

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My thinking is "Let professionals be professionals". It's impossible to know enough to be an expert at every everything for every aspect of a website or company. Learn how to spend money.. by that I mean, learn how to spend the right amount of money, at the right time, to the right people, to get exactly what you want, every time.

 

If you're going to be a professional at anything, become a professional at spending money, and delegating (speccing out jobs) that will return the result that you want. You'll be much less stressed, and get things done WAY faster than trying to be a SuperMan (or SuperWoman) :)

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This is actually a great topic. I've spent money on different sites for probably every asked of owning a site. I think the best money is spent of design and Advertising.

 

Design: I've had custom designs made for my sites which have turned out to be the best i've ever had, and i've had designers do logos on their own. If you have the money and resources to pay for a custom design, i believe this alone will set you apart from any competition. Having the right layout will bring members back for more and more. If you know nothing about functionality, leave it to the pro.

 

Advertising: While a single person can do a lot of adverts themselves, it's much easier and less time consuming to have a company or a professional reach out to their people. I'm probably spending 100-200 a month in ads for all my sites, and i think it's well worth it. It hasn't yielded many members yet, but i know it's getting my brand in front of some eyes. And that repeated process is what brings people to know and grow confidence in your site/product.

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I would also pay for things that i am not good with. Although for online stuff, i only pay for design and try to do others by myself. It does take a lot of time this way though.

Better to keep someone to help you i.e, professionals.

 

 

Gotta spend money to make it :)

 

Thats one thing I totally agree with.

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If you want to run a successful business or website, you need to outsource things that consume too much time or effort. I learnt it the hard way when I discovered that by trying to do everything myself, I was not able to focus on running and promoting my site. There are so many things that I outsource these days – content creation, designing, backlinking and many others. Why to waste valuable time when you can get things done by spending some dollars?

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I would pay for anything that I can't do myself. If I needed some PHP coded, I'd pay somebody to do that, if I needed the server optimized etc etc. We could go on forever, but I'd mainly pay for things that I am not experienced in or don't know how to do from my own experience.

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I'm willing to pay for the infrastructure (hosting, VPS, cloud, domains and whatnot), but I'm fairly confident in doing all my own development. With all the frameworks out there for PHP and JavaScript specifically designed to make things secure and intuitive, I don't see reason to hire another developer. An exception to this is forum software, I'm perfectly happy paying for IPB because there's no sense reinventing the wheel there, and every free forum package I've used seems to suck (cue flamewar?).

 

One thing many people pay for is SEO work. I personally think the whole thing is BS and I wouldn't invest a single penny in that. ;)

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I admit that I try to do everything myself especially at the start-up phase. Unfortunately, there are some things I can't do :sweat:, so I have paid for logos, wordpress theme tweaking, some coding and ebook covers. It just makes life so much easier and productive.

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There are times when you need a specific plugin which you wanted to be created for your website. That is when I will be willing to hire someone. I will also hire someone professional to make a theme for a forum so that the theme is forum specific not just one which can be seen on every forum you go to.

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I am great with marketing, Design, CSS, HTML and jQuery but when it comes to PHP I am useless so that is when I get the professionals in to create what I need when I need it. I have a good friend who is great with PHP and creates anything I need at a very reasonable price, so I can't complain :)

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Anything I can't do and don't have the time or inclination to learn. :)

 

Up until this year, I'd never paid for anything for a site - I'd always either lived with the limitations imposed by my lack of knowledge or gone out and learned whatever I had to in order to fix whatever was broken. I paid for a book cover design towards the end of the year and I'd paid for illustrations for another project before, but neither of those was for a site.

 

This year, I've hired two logo designers and a Drupal developer... and have tried to hire someone to build a site I wanted to be a combination of forum and gallery. That died a death because no one was competent in the things I wanted, so I spent several hours learning the essentials and built the damned thing myself!

 

Apart from coding and especially design (since my artistic abilities are limited to admiring good work), I handle pretty much everything myself. That said, I wanted to hire one of my Twitter contacts to do my blog design/theme setup because I knew she'd be awesome and a lot quicker than me - but unfortunately she couldn't do it. Although that was something I can (and did) do myself, her expertise would have been worth it for the time saving.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I pay for designs and code them myself, though I'm not exactly an expert in coding. I sometimes design logos on my own, but it's more fun to outsource that because the results are always unpredictable. I find it more fun to go with someone else's logo.

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  • 2 years later...

I pay for anything and everything that I'm not an expert with.

 

I'm great with the database and back end functionality, but when it comes to design or advertising they are people that are far better at it than I am. So I pay them to get results while I stick to the rest.

 

Gotta spend money to make it :)

 

I suck at front end programming as well. When designing a site I'm always so glad when I'm done with design and I finally start the fun part; the back end.

 

It's much easier (and funny) to create the logic, work the the database, etc. than it is to be creative enough to do a good job at designing. I find it very difficult to create original and attractive looking designs.

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  • 3 years later...

Well if I am not good at something I find someone else who is and I pay for its work no matter in what domain this is. We must admit that we are not good to do everything in this world, we all have our meaning and specialization and when the time comes and we cannot do something to find someone who does, no one works for free so, we must pay for it.

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  • 7 months later...

I'll pay professionals as long as they can deliver what I need, but also I try to gain experience for those things I don't know how to do myself so in the future I won't need outsourcing. It's not only about wanting to do something by yourself, though; you might learn those things but still don't have the time to do them, and you'd still need extra hands. Learning how a specialty works would enable you to evaluate the works of others better and judge if you have good employees. 

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On 3/15/2012 at 1:17 AM, Jessi said:

We all want to be experts in every field, but truth is, sometimes there are people who are better at doing things than we are.

 

So when it comes to your site, what are you willing to pay someone else to do? Would you pay for a theme, for example, or do you prefer to build it yourself? Would you have someone else do the logo design?

I will pay a person for nearly everything on web building. Expert service is better than shoddy work. An expert website sells better.

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If you are not good at something, don't try to do it yourself. You will not only get the job done but spoil all the hardwork you had done so far. Hire an expert to do it for you. It might cost you money but trust me, in the end you will realize you did a fine job by letting the expert handle the things for you.

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