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Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

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Re: Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

#61

Post by hobofan »

akudha wrote: post #52
yuchi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You contact them. They are typically pretty vocal online, so finding them is not that difficult.

You mean, cold email them? Just pitch them and ask if they have surplus work?

Either cold email them, or try to get an intro through your network (= how you would contact any business for anything). Then you pitch them your skillset and your daily/hourly rate, and they'll decide to place you on their freelance/consulting roster or not.

There is a small split for how you would freelancing vs. consulting via agencies in my experience.

For consulting, you will usually only be brought on if you have a special skill set that the agency themselves can't fill out, and often only if their client specially requests those services. So consulting work via agencies is much rarer in my experience.

For freelancing, as long as the agency is doing well there is almost always something to do, and ~20% of their tech teams consist of freelancers, so it's not really "surplus work" but more their part of their normal mode of operation.

Of course, all of this are just anecdotal data, and may vary widely from region to region.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

#62

Post by snowwrestler »

akudha wrote: post #52
yuchi wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You contact them. They are typically pretty vocal online, so finding them is not that difficult.

You mean, cold email them? Just pitch them and ask if they have surplus work?

Yes. Agencies pitch all the time to find their own clients, so they are not averse to getting pitched themselves.

A cold email better be great to work. A better bet is to go to meetups and local conferences for like Wordpress or SEO or digital marketing. You’re likely to meet some agency folks or people who contract with agencies. Chat them up, offer to buy them lunch, stay in contact.

Or, just look up agencies who are hiring for developers. Contact them and offer your contracting services.

A good portfolio is key. Strong client references are even better but it takes time to build those.

You can also do thought leadership type stuff like blog about topics, or participate in regional online communities.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

#63

Post by adamqureshi »

notahacker wrote: post #43
adamqureshi wrote: post #38

Ad agencies here in NYC sub-contract out work all the time. They are sick of outsourcing to 3rd world. I'd connect with ad agencies in your area see if you can get sub-contract work. And you can charge $1,500-$3k to set up a SquareSpace site. Target dentist, interior designers, yoga studios. Forget the local pizza shop as a customer. If your building with WP then offer support. WP is being updated all the time and wi…

> Forget the local pizza shop as a customer The local pizza shop's potentially a good customer if you're selling them a way to take orders online and get people to buy their special offers and refer their friends through social media . Plenty of value in that, especially if you're yielding more proven results than those flyers they pay to have printed and delivered every couple of months. If you're selling them a hom…

I take it back. Pizza shop guy needs to know what delivery service to use. The local guy down the block from me uses door-dash, uber eats and needs help with his yelp listing. Just uploading the menu to his yelp. He has no FB page. I explained to him he can take orders , get more customers using his FB page and use FB messenger. You can market this stuff to your local pizza guy. Just a 1 pager with Location, Menu, yelp links and an about us ( People love a good story) But the damn pizza has to be good. We have 50 pizza shops in a 1 mile radius.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

#64

Post by ryandoom »

CareyB wrote: post #26

I’ve been at this since the ninteies. At the peak I was getting $2500 for a ten page Drupal site I could do over the weekend. These days you can get a ‘custom’ programmed site from a guy reselling the services of an Asian programming group for $100, so how are you supposed to compete? I have made some money ‘fixing’ those sites, but for the most part my business is dead agaist things like Wix (Ugh), or Goddady Site B…

Yikes, doing this since the 90s and your top price is 2500k?! You are focusing on the wrong opportunities and I bet you lose a lot of opportunities and you don’t know why.

If you pitch a 2500k website to a 20+ person business there is 0 perceived value in that. That’s one persons time in their org for 2 weeks.

What’s the value you are bringing? Decades of experience, marketing experience, conversion optimization, inbound marketing strategies, CRM integration...

If that business is - say a law firm for 20 attorneys.

A sale to them is 10K+ for a new legal gig.

If your website can outperform others and you bring them 5 more leads a month, 50+ more leads a year ... 10+ more sales then you can charge much more!

You are losing jobs to companies charging for the real value they bring.

Let those small one to two person companies use wix or whatever

And if that’s the only value you bring then you need to learn different skills

Companies WANT to pay good money for good services. They are probably laughing at your 2500 quote and going with the 25,000 quote.

Move of the value chain. They get a new website but that’s not what you’re selling.

You’re selling leads, sales, new business, business growth, hands off / zero worries on their part.

Start charging way more today.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

#65

Post by zuttton »

ianai wrote: post #58
hanoz wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If (I assume) your skills are on the coding and architecture side of things, how so you cope with the visual design side of things, for your "build me a web site" clients?

If he’s maintaining sores then maybe that’s already done.

What does maintaining sores mean?

Re: Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

#66

Post by CM30 »

Well, all the agencies I worked with in the past are still in business, and hundreds of such companies come up in Google when I search for 'web design agency in [place name]', so there definitely must still be at least some money in it.

Either way, I think there's definitely still interest there. Yes, you can make some types of basic sites through stuff like SquareSpace and Wix. But a lot of business owners don't want to do things themselves. They're not design like, often not too tech savvy and just don't feel being the one responsible for their entire website.

For them, they'll go to an agency or development company for the same reason you may go to a restaurant or cafe; because they'd rather someone who knows more about the topic build in than play designer/developer themself.

They also often like having support in a place that's easier to reach. If the company who built the site is local, they can phone them, send an email without worrying about time zones or pop down the office when something breaks rather than having to deal with a multinational corporation via support tickets or live chat.

There's also (as said) the many types of sites that are a bit too complex than can be done via a site builder but too simple to require an in house development team; those are often things these small web design/dev businesses take care of too.

So yeah, overall the market is certainly a bit smaller than it used to be, but it's still there, either because people want a professional to do the job rather than doing it themselves or because their needs are a bit more complex than can be achieved with a site builder.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

#67

Post by interfacesketch »

I hope it's OK to piggyback on this question and ask: are there any opportunities in designing (and selling) website themes, particulalrly non-Wordpress themes?

Many replies here say don't offer design. But presumably, even when you're developing the backend, you need to reach for a front-end design or template - either free or for sale. The market for HTML/CSS themes is completely saturated though - is it fruitless to pursue this avenue?

Re: Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

#68

Post by akudha »

snowwrestler wrote: post #62
akudha wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean, cold email them? Just pitch them and ask if they have surplus work?

Yes. Agencies pitch all the time to find their own clients, so they are not averse to getting pitched themselves. A cold email better be great to work. A better bet is to go to meetups and local conferences for like Wordpress or SEO or digital marketing. You’re likely to meet some agency folks or people who contract with agencies. Chat them up, offer to buy them lunch, stay in contact. Or, just look up agencies who a…

Thank you for the comment. This is new to me, will try this out. Are you a freelancer too? Is this how you got started?

Re: Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

#69

Post by dwd »

jason_pomerleau wrote: post #50
Zealotux wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Impressive figures, congratulations for growing your business that much. I've always had a hard time being taken seriously when I was doing Wordpress websites, may I where do you get clients? You should share your experience in a blog, I'd love to read that kind of stuff.

100% referrals from happy clients, or people I’ve worked with in various contexts over the years. If you do great work and manage clients properly, word gets around. A client with 20 staff - in a year, 2 or 3 of those people will be working for another company. If you’ve left a good impression, over time the network effects take hold. The trick is to survive long enough to reach that point :) the first couple of year…

That is very good advise.

The junior marketing person you are working with at one company a few years later may be head of marketing at a much larger company.

It can also work in reverse when your contact moves on and their replacement comes in with a pre-existing relationship with a competitor. Then it's nothing but work to keep them - same can happen when a small business sells and you have a new owner to build a new relationship with.

Have a client that is in the process of selling to what will be the fourth owner since I built their management software 12 or so years ago.

Re: Ask HN: Is there any money in website design for small businesses anymore?

#70

Post by ryanmarsh »

Sell an online course for $49 that helps small business owners create their own site for their business, using no-code tools, thus saving them thousands of dollars, hours of their time, and the potential embarrassment from doing it wrong.

Start writing Medium articles dumping everything a small business owner should know before creating their own site, about running their own site, about hiring a consultant like yourself, about marketing themselves online, etc...

Record 2min YouTube videos summarizing each of your articles.

Put the videos and articles on your site with a CTA to buy your course. Explain how, after they take your course, how their life/business will be different and better.

Profit

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