How much does it cost to hire a elancer to customize a WP template?

[jimmychuang]

How much does it cost to hire a elancer to customize a WP template?

I plan to find designer to customize my WP blog, and create a logo.

In average, how much can I find a professional designer at rentacoder?

[ergophobe]

What do you mean customize? Some customizations are very easy, some are hard.

If you have a few simple changes and you can find the theme designer, try to hire that person - she won't have to waste time getting oriented with the theme and might be able to do everything you need for more per hour, but less overall than a rentacoder.

For something like $250 (check that) you can run a competition on sitepoint for a template design.

A well-known designer who designed the most downloaded theme at wordpress.org had a blog post a year or so ago saying he charged $1600 for a completely new theme from scratch for a major a-list blogger.

[jimmychuang]

$1600~~

I can't afford that much....

If I just want to customize a free template to a different look. Does it possible just lower than $250?

[ergophobe]

Again, it depends on what you want to do. Many customizations are so easy that it shouldn't be hard to figure out how to do them.

Get Firefox if you don't use it already.
- add the colorzilla eyedropper
- the EditCSS plugin
- the Firebug plugin

Using these you can find out where pretty much anything is styled. If you're just changing colors, you should be able to figure this out in an evening.

Otherwise you'll need to get a template, come up with a list of specific changes you want, and then ask for bids. Could be anything from $20 to $500.

It's like asking "How much will it cost to get someone to fix my car"? without saying what's actually wrong with you car.

[ibQuixote]

You can get people to bid on the project on freelance websites. I would think you would get bids between $50 and $500

[jimbeetle]

Ya' know, if you simply go to eLance and search for WordPress under projects you'll get a pretty good idea of what the going rates there are.

[old_expat]

As someone who just made some changes to 2 different WP themes, I can tell you that some themes are easier to understand than others. The first I tried was the most popular 3 column layout and I could never figure out what was happening.

I tried another 3 column layout that took me a few hours (I'm slow .. not a pro) because I had to make some new background images (designer had used repeated images to look like fancy borders).

[vincevincevince]

Do you know what changes you need, or are you hoping to get design work as well as customisation?

[jimmychuang]

I can only use photoimpact to create a screen shot of the blog theme I want. Then ask for a coder to customize a free theme to look like that.