TL;DR
As a <i>single</i> founder/coder/hobbyist how do you do webdesign / frontend of a web service you build when all you ever did was devops/backend engineering?<p>Long story:
I wish to build a site relevant to my passion (travelling) which I think could also be very useful to other travellers. I wouldn't call it a "startup" by who knows - it might turn into one.<p>The issue: all I ever did and enjoyed was the invisible part of web services - server setup and management, deployments, monitoring, performance tweeks. But the core functionality of my "startup" will need a slick and modern responsive web interface. It will be close to impossible to use templates or CMSes like wordpress for it.<p>I enjoy reading about new UI toolkits, JS libraries and CSS helpers. I even built a slick and modern submitting form with PureCSS ! ;-) But no doubt I have no "taste of art / design" so I will never be able to do anything close as my friend did with html tables and gifs for spacing 10 years ago.<p>How do you, fellow engineers, coupe with that? I do not want it to block me from working on my project.
you can get some inspiration from websites like themeforest(where you can buy some nice templates for cheap prices) once you have a theme you like you can implement that one or just adapt it to your needs but having a base to work on I think it's important. I understand you, I am a web developer, I can write css/javascript and anything I need but my taste is terrible. So that is what I usually do, I begin with a base and start to work on it, adapting, changing, adding and then I polish the result. It's not the best thing to do but usually works fine. If I had tons of money to spend I would probably do something different but since I don't...
If you're serious about the project hire a designer to create the designs for you as layered PSD.<p>It sounds like you should be able to implement them yourself. I work with designers that are local to me, but you can find some pretty good ones on odesk.