montooner

I want to help out a business-type friend by giving him the information he needs to understand what he's buying when he outsources his website. He's going to be investing in a web presence for his startup company, and they don't have a CTO to coordinate (a) which web services (shared host/domain/SSL) he needs to buy, and (b) how the web technologies break down so he can begin to understand the work that freelancers (what tech front end entails, and what tech back end entails) will be doing for his site.<p>I picked this information up piecewise through experience, staying up to date with HN/subreddits, and Wikipedia. He wants a consolidated source. And I also can't sit down with him for hours to provide consulting.<p>Ultra mega bonus round: If the information source(s) includes tips about how he might to split up work between freelancers. I don't think it's a great idea, but I think it'll give him a better understanding of how to outsource.

Front end/graphics has always been my Achilles heel. This project that I'm working on (www.mgxcopy.com) is long overdue for a design refactoring, and I want to find someone/some-firm whom will (a) generate programmatically clean code that I can work with and be seo friendly and (b) I may be able to call upon for further work on the site.

I want to up the visual quality as well as the usability/functionality of the site tremendously, and I'm new to beauty in the front end. Basically, just graphics as well as cross-browser, seo-/programmer-friendly code would be great. But ideally, I'd get some snappy js-animation to the user experience.

I have already checked out Crowdspring, but am satisifed neither by the quality nor the prospect of getting good code. And in my mind the other options are Craigslist, and iterations of Google searches. I'm also considering posting on the 37signals Job Board or the Smashing Magazine Board, but I'd rather not spend the money till I'm sure I have no other options.

So: what are some venues you have used to find front end developers or--as a front-end developer--you use to find jobs? And as a bonus question: what can I expect for a budget of $3-5k?