Contracting out site design - not implementation

[jakobn]

hi,

i am a webmaster with a reasonably large (4,000+ page) legacy site, which is hosted in-house.

my dilemma is that i want to get it professionally redesigned, but i want to implement the new design in-house.

the site is html 4, with partial database driven areas, and has been worked on by half a dozen people over the years. so it's a bit of a jumble. my intention is to standardise the content parts of each page, and slot them into new templates.

the templates however, i would like professionally designed. once done we can add in all the content in-house.

does this kind of arrangement sound familiar to anyone? a lot of the contacts i've had so far want to do a lot more than this (implement a new search engine, forum, etc.).

does anyone have any comments on this redesign strategy, i.e. working with designers on the site structure and design only, with the main deliverables being a number of templates. are there any significant drawbacks? will i be charged more for such a 'partial' service?

thanks in advance

[knighty]

The biggest job re-designing a site is the actual front page and sub page layout. So once you've actually created the templates doing the rest is pretty easy.

I would guess a designer would work on the basis that 90% of the hard work is creating the templates after that its just a case of filling in the blanks.

[korkus2000]

I agree with knighty. I have done redesigns like this and you can't really charge a whole lot for them. Most of the blood sweat and tears has all ready done.

You are basically paying a designer to put a pretty face on what you got. There are a lot of constraints a designer will have to follow, and this may be a real tough task for most general web artists.