Contact Web DesignerI just read a blog post by my friend and jewelry designer, Luann Udell about a brand new web banner that she hired someone to do for about $30. She talked a little bit about wanting to figure it out for herself, but in the interest of saving time and frustration, she decided to spend the $30 and have someone with more graphic design experience than her do it. She’s well pleased with the results.

Now why am I bringing up this story? I write a lot about on this blog how there are a lot of things that you can do yourself. I get questions from readers on how to do this on Photoshop or how to tweak that page in Dreamweaver and I answer them as best I can. But at a certain point, you have to think to yourself, “Is it really worth doing everything myself?”. You can learn to build a website, but is that the best use of your time? You can cobble together a web banner for that blog ad you bought or for your Etsy store, but is it going to be the most effective banner possible?

Now I’m also web designer as well as a jewelry designer, so I might be a bit biased, but I’ve seen plenty of cases where my client would have been better off hiring someone to install that piece of software or to build that website or to design that ebook cover in the first place because the results were disastrous. I’m not saying that it’s not worth you learning how to do some things yourself. I’m saying that you need to know when it’s not worth it. Such as:

  1. You’re in a hurry and you need it done well and quickly
  2. You have no knowledge how to do something and really no interest in learning
  3. You need to get something done and you’re already only sleep 5 hours a night because you’ve got so many other things to do.
  4. You have just enough knowledge to be really dangerous and it’s a really big deal if you try to do it and mess it up

Now of course hiring someone to do something whether it’s building a website or designing a graphic banner, means spending money…which we really don’t like to do…especially when the market is tight. But getting help doesn’t have to be expensive and it doesn’t have to be an ordeal to find a good person. And in the end it can be worth the money. For about $30 Luann got a brand new banner. She also saved hours of time and frustration. And I imagine that that was worth more than the $30.

Tomorrow, I’ll give you some tips on how to find help without breaking the bank or going crazy.