So I Started A WEB DESIGN Company

Good stuff, it's nice to have someone who can sell working with you. Keep it simple like you have and you can make some decent money.

That's great! Thanks for sharing your experiences!

I am a professional web designer but I don't consider myself 'good' at selling. I don't like 'cold-calling' and I wish that I had a friend like yours with that kind of experience.

I don't intend it to get any bigger, or intend on selling any other services... this at the moment is just "nice"...

an example website we've done:

Blithfield Training

Yup...this works famously. All you need is a StudioPress Developer license.

Congratulations! Nice work! With more patience and knowledge, you'll surely come a long way.

This is a great example of a simple idea that still works. Many over think things and attempt to re-create things that do not need fixing. Congrats

Good job. You have quite the setup. Keep it simple and don't get ahead of yourself

I think it's great you are embarking on your new "adventure" and wish you the best.

In a former lifetime, in a place far far away in time, way before wordpress, I developed and maintained web sites for a living. Made decent money at it, mostly by giving clients what they wanted, even if it was wrong. Yep, you read correctly, some of my clients wanted things on their sites that were so far from what they needed or would help their businesses, it was downright silly. Just got tired of trying to convince them to do things that would make them more money when they seemed so against it.

Like with ncmedia, I came to almost hate some of my clients, but couldn't pass up the money. Finally got into the "if they want it they'll pay more, way more to get it" mode. You may be familiar with the process. At first, everything is great, they are model customers, and you make a decent profit for your time. Then come the little changes/additions that creep in. Every month it's another little time sink that you have to add, and before long, you're making about $10 per hour, and the demands aren't going to stop growing.

So what to do? At next contract, change to quarterly renewal instead of anual. Increase the price to cover at least existing time commitments and carry on. The phone calls get worse, it turns out they really need a business consultant (used to do that too) so the conversations focus on basic business needs, quite beyond the web design, development and maintenance on the masthead. Next quarter, increase the price again (and again) The web site suffers from a near-terminal case of creeping elegance, but can't get the customer to even think about a redesign to clean things up. Offer a bottom dollar, $500 to completely redesign... would probably make half of the development costs back in saved time alone the first quarter, so willing to do nearly anything but free. Nope... like it like it is, no changes. Even moving to another state doesn't help, and it's worse because client apparently cannot fathom talking to someone in another time zone, hence calls at 0-mygoddoyouknowwhattimeitis-430? Severalo times a week? This wouldn't be a problem, but this isn't the only problem client. Finally, give client 90 days notice can't renew contract, she will need to find someone else, suggest several folks local to her. Hear from them a couple of months later, she went with someone else who charged her $5000 to get the basics working, and nearly twice my highest quarterly maintenance rate, and less than a quarter of the features are no longer there. THAT was a great salesman, I tell you. (Or shows how poor a salesman I was then.)
Within the next year, the site goes through three other web design folk, different look each time.

Toward the end, nearly everyone seemed to want the world and for nothing. They hear that someone else will do it for less, and complain if you can't respond instantly and for the price of a third world outsource. At first I thought it was me, but the more other web folk I spoke with, the more wide spread I found the problem.

At least with Wordpress, you have a structure to implement, the tools are there and easy to use, and you shouldn't have many of the issues the we "old world" web designers went through. I hope the new crop of customers don't follow the patterns of the past.

I really like online marketing a lot better. You make a product, sell it, and support the product to the limit of the concept you sold. If there are additions or corrections, you make a new version and send a gratis copy to all customers of the previous version. They're happy and buy a different new product you develop and you're happy too. If you don't get your next product out as quickly because you took a couple of weeks off, nobody knows the difference. Your customer support team can handle the little things while you are having fun... Much better than being on the string for a bunch of other people's sites and whims, in my opinion.

Thanks for bringing this back from the recesses of my mind. It will help me through any tough times I may encounter. I hope the intereactions you have with your web clients are better. At least with Wordpress, you can get the site in place, then teach the client how to maintain it, and you can go on to the next clients. Much cleaner and you can still have a life.

Think about charging a monthly fee- this is better for long-term, if the customer stays with you for more than a year. For example, say that you need $10 for hosting and then another $15 for handling, this results in $300 per year. Now multiply with 10 or so

I would be happy to have a friend who's good in cold calling or selling such services...

We used the same method to grow the business however.....

BE CAREFUL. Yellow Pages take action against companies using their directory as a call list. They do not like it and have deep pockets.

They plant bogus ads within their directory to catch out cold callers.

developing and selling websites is not new to the world, but some people can really achieve good results with it as I see...

My congratulations! :-))

Congratulations to you. May you continue to succeed on your chosen field.

Joseph - Congratulations!

I've actually just formed a marketing company to start doing simple website as one of our services. I use the Socrates theme for my Word Press sites as it builds a clean and manageable website for my clients.

Good luck!

JR

I did freelance web design for years (see my startup kit in my signature) and today, I do NONE.

The reasons I could write about for hours, but put simply - I work hard now to build passive income, and avoid anything that involves trading dollars for hours.

Clients are a nightmare.

yes, you can take the right great way to earn more money. so congrats.

Great Post!

I was thinking of doing something similar with offline clients in my local area. I see so many atrocious websites that must be harming a business rather than serving it in any profitable way that there's definitely a market for this.

Good luck with! You could even throw together a new version of someones existing crappy website then contact them and say "hey, look what I did....you want to buy it for xxx?" - if it doesn't take too long this might be ok. Obviously, you wouldnt do it for large sites though in case you didnt get paid. Even just do a graphical mock-up and then if they like it, code it up.

Yes I love this post....Will make my wife read it

Perfect Example of KISS

Just landed another local customer today :-) ... a wedding shop. should be interesting

Think I'll give this a try myself after Christmas when I have some time. My girlfriend has a business degree and is great at sales so she could handle that for me :-)

If you start piling up jobs through referrals, etc, get an outsourcer to put those simple sites together for you, you've got a real nice gig going.

Nice idea Dru Man.

Our next step is to target EVERY accountant in the UK without a website... this should keep us busy

Why don't you have your clients sign up with Hostgator themselves through your affiliate link? I'm not an affiliate for them but hear the payout is $125.

Just a thought.

Nice post it good see simple way to make money on the internet....Good Luck

Yeah, you could get them in on a lot of nice services:
-Hosting - $60-$100+
-Aweber - can't recall, maybe $10 per
-Reports - you could easily outsource reports for clients that want it monthly
-SEO - big window of opportunity here. Another thing that you can outsource
-Video/Social media - same as seo in terms of opportunity. Businesses will probably understand this a bit more than SEO (at least in my experience).

Just a few that can really explode your monthly recurring earnings through the roof.

I do the same method when things are tight or if I am wanting a new toy :-)

I have it slighly easier though I donthave to cold call I just mail my list :-)

I also sell seo services which is provig to be very profitable...... infact its love residual income for almost no work

Well done though what if ound is that with more money you can outsource

Danny

I am currently getting into this. It's nice to hear the successes of some of the members on here. My main problem is taking too much time with the sites. I always want to keep tweaking it and end up lowering my $/hrs. Are you promising any kind of SEO with the purchase or only what Wordpress will do?

Great job.

Does seem as though you are selling yourself short on the price but great job anyhow.

Congratulations! You might try to put some advertisement of your service in Free Classifieds and all. Will definitely give you some leads.

How do you set your pricing?

Is it a one time fee?

Congratulations on your success so far, and good luck with it all in the future!

Ruchi

I did the same thing 10 years ago, started a web hosting company... hated it and found that it was much better served as a platform for my design company. I now out source everything, I have a team of 30+ developers in India and we average 4 to 5 sites a month. Just to give you an example I usually never pay more than $250 for the development but the return is great. I sell most sites for $1200 to 2300 so this is a great return. We also pump out tons of small $500 sites to people who just want a simple site. The only down site is comunication and chasing the money, ALWAYS collect half up front.

Nice one cheers for the advice, giving me some great ideas here.

I've found lots of nice themes on theme forest but have to stop myself buying things on impulse.... especially now that it's not just my money in this business... wish there was a way to try the themes before buying them ( i know you get the preview, but I would like to try it with different logos and content )

Thanks again everyone!

Joe

Don't use paid themes anymore, they are cheap.... get your customer to select 5 sites he or she likes. They can even be templates from templatemonster. Then have your developer use that as the basis of the new site design. You cant copy it directly but it sure helps with the idea and that is the most difficult in my opinion. Also, start out sourcing, your waising your time doing it all your self. I do everything, sales, hosing, (seo oursourced) (development outsourced) etc... Odesk and Skype are your best friends.