If you're not a designer, don't design. Just focus on building your product, app, service, whatever. Visual design is temporary and won't hinder adoption as long as the product itself works as advertised and is fun to use.
Set your hourly rate, configure it to represent how much time you think you'd waste sifting through online designs and spend that amount on a decent theme that will work with Bootstrap, Foundation or any other framework that a developer can configure.
Designers don't post billable collateral on the web. They're too busy working and keeping their design under the radar is part of the business. They don't have a Github mindset so don't bother trying.
> Visual design is temporary and won't hinder adoption as long as the product itself works as advertised and is fun to use.
This is so wrong on so many levels. Of course it will hinder the adoption. In fact a poor design is likely to kill it altogether.
For one, and print this out in bold Comic Sans and hang it at the eye level, - "First impression lasts." If something looks like poop, no one will bother checking out if it works as advertised.
For two, and this follows from #1, a good product with a poor design is not likely to outperform a poor product with a good design simply because there will be fewer people trying former.
For three, it's not "fun to use", it's "a pleasure to use," again meaning that the visual component is the product is vital. Show me a poorly designed product that is fun to use. Seriously.
Just to be clear, visual design is not about drop shadows, background textures and glass effects. It is about forming an appropriate product impression. You just can't expect an average user to look past an ungodly frontend and appreciate the beauty of the guts. This just doesn't happen. You need... strike that... you must consider the design at the same level of importance as any other feature of the product. The same goes for "oh, just pick a theme" - sure, but it's a goddamn theme that's used in hundreds other places, so guess what - it comes with a "generic shit" tag. You want to have your blog/site/service have this vibe - fine, but is it sensible thing to do - hardly.
You're obviously too young to recall the first versions of Facebook or maybe you haven't even taken a good hard look at the latest one. They all suck but they're fun for their users and adoption rates speak volumes.
> Just to be clear, visual design is not about drop shadows, background textures and glass effects.
You have no idea about what you're talking about. You're not even a rookie.
Set your hourly rate, configure it to represent how much time you think you'd waste sifting through online designs and spend that amount on a decent theme that will work with Bootstrap, Foundation or any other framework that a developer can configure.
Designers don't post billable collateral on the web. They're too busy working and keeping their design under the radar is part of the business. They don't have a Github mindset so don't bother trying.