As someone who is about to have gone through the process twice of starting from scratch and launching (with a team of at most 3), I recommend that you use your time wisely.
The first time through, we had my design up for the first 1.5 years followed by a professional overhaul from a close friend when it started to gain some traction. The difference between the two designs was night-and-day.
This time through, I put up a quick landing page with some basic "coming soon" boilerplate at the beginning. Since I enjoy a minimalist and clean design, I can hack together a site rather quickly. Yes, it is functional. Yes, it appeals to me. No, it doesn't look professional. But most importantly, updating and maintaining it occupied a lot of my time that I could have spent working on the back-end.
The 2nd design was crafted by a designer. Unfortunately, because I had spent all of my time doing the design the first time, I now had no content to give to the designer to work with. I'm sure that he hated the fact that I kept changing my mind on the public pages every other week. To his credit, he created a very impressive set of internal pages for the web-app even though that wasn't his strong suit.
With some content finally available, I hacked the public pages to create the 3rd (and current) site to accommodate the new content.
With an imminent launch, I've finally done what I should have done first: place an ad in Smashing Magazine and hire a designer! In fact, I was able to find a gfx/web designer for the front 4 pages (home, features, tour, signup) and a usability designer in our scientific discipline to evaluate the internal pages. Best of all, I get to launch the company sooner!
Long story short, our launch is imminent because I get to focus on what I do best (HPC back-end) and the front-end gets done by an expert.
The first time through, we had my design up for the first 1.5 years followed by a professional overhaul from a close friend when it started to gain some traction. The difference between the two designs was night-and-day.
This time through, I put up a quick landing page with some basic "coming soon" boilerplate at the beginning. Since I enjoy a minimalist and clean design, I can hack together a site rather quickly. Yes, it is functional. Yes, it appeals to me. No, it doesn't look professional. But most importantly, updating and maintaining it occupied a lot of my time that I could have spent working on the back-end.
The 2nd design was crafted by a designer. Unfortunately, because I had spent all of my time doing the design the first time, I now had no content to give to the designer to work with. I'm sure that he hated the fact that I kept changing my mind on the public pages every other week. To his credit, he created a very impressive set of internal pages for the web-app even though that wasn't his strong suit.
With some content finally available, I hacked the public pages to create the 3rd (and current) site to accommodate the new content.
With an imminent launch, I've finally done what I should have done first: place an ad in Smashing Magazine and hire a designer! In fact, I was able to find a gfx/web designer for the front 4 pages (home, features, tour, signup) and a usability designer in our scientific discipline to evaluate the internal pages. Best of all, I get to launch the company sooner!
Long story short, our launch is imminent because I get to focus on what I do best (HPC back-end) and the front-end gets done by an expert.