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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?

#161

Post by drewmol »

potta_coffee wrote: post #137
gremlinsinc wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats your hourly? I'm more laravel/mobile/node/vue/react, and I find I under-charge, but I think if I were doing WP I'd need to charge even less... Currently my best-long-term client pays $40...but I feel I want/deserve 60-70 and trying to land that for my next couple clients... do people pay you more than $40/hr for wordpress or do you just charge per project?

Question wasn't for me, but I charge $50 hourly and I know I'm undercharging because my clients end up being surprised at how cheap the invoice is.

If you uped your rate to 75, they know your value and probably wouldn't jump ship. Even if 25% did you still make more with less total hours and more potential revenue for any referral business you get. You also get the benifit of not feeling under valued which can drive you to increase the scope of services you provide to existing clients.

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

#162

Post by brundolf »

I live in the Austin area and tried this for a bit. There are tons of decades-old local businesses here, so I thought it'd be a treasure trove of jobs building fresh ones. I got one solid gig with a local music shop who needed a website with a CMS for maintaining an every-changing product inventory, but that was all I could find. Everybody else was good with Squarespace, so I went back to a desk job. I'm sure if I'd looked a little harder I could've found some "medium businesses", but I'd expected the finding part to be easy, and it wasn't.

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

#163

Post by nandreev »

paulcole wrote: post #85

Yes. I work at a 15-person agency doing website design and SEO for small businesses up from about 5 when I started there 4 years ago. We specialize in a few verticals and have a few industries we won’t work with. We do wordpress only and turn away plenty of clients who we don’t want to work with.

Really curious about the state of agency SEO services these days. Do you guys just do the standard on-page tweaks, or is there some backlink building too?

I once looked into the backlink profiles of a successful SEO agency's clients and I discovered a makeshift PBN going on; they had 100s of sites ready to go and would just add client links to them. In predictable patterns (# of referrer pages would jump weekly etc.) Presumably this is fine because it's working and this is how they promise position increases / page 1 for certain kw etc.

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

#164

Post by Domark »

Is this a joke? Of course there are ways to run successful business nowadays like Web Design. Here's an example: https://www.bluecompass.com

Seriously, these types of "Ask HN" seem like trolling. How can people be this ignorant? Is it lack of schooling? Lack of parenting?

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

#165

Post by goatherders »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #153
rograndom wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are probably undercharging. Not parent, but my WordPress specific work was either a flat fee for standard stuff (setting up a site, installing and configuring an existing theme, plugins, etc), or $50/hr for customization either through writing new plugins or adding functionality to an existing theme via PHP or CSS. Laravel or other custom work starts at $125 for clients I'm expecting volume from or $150 for one o…

Where do you find clients? My bread/butter is basically reddit - /r/forhire, Upwork is total shit, so I don't even login there anymore. I'm wanting to potentially do some sort of hosting/support plan...and work on a site that has a ton more inbound marketing related articles on my biz. Then hire some offshore or jr devs or techs wanting to become devs to support the easy issues, I'll take care of the harder stuff, or…

This business model is tried and true (WP Curve, GoWP). In fact GoWP has a great white label solution to handle all the maintenance you speak of at a fair cost. I used to combine their service with hosting on WP Engine (which included Sucuri for security) and have a ready made MRR model for WordPress.

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

#166

Post by branweb »

ryandoom wrote: post #64
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, inb…

1. maybe not your intention, but this reads as quite rude

2. you mean 2.5k not 2500k. The latter would be a king's ransom for a wordpress site, even by your (apparently) high standards

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

#167

Post by jason_pomerleau »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #127
jason_pomerleau wrote: post #16

There is lots of opportunity out there, but it depends on what you mean by ‘small business’. Super small companies (under 10 to 15 people in this context) are usually best off with SquareSpace or Wix. Companies slightly larger than this invariably end up wanting/needing things that these platforms can’t offer, and have the kind of budgets that can support a solo operator or small team. At this level, you are competin…

Whats your hourly? I'm more laravel/mobile/node/vue/react, and I find I under-charge, but I think if I were doing WP I'd need to charge even less... Currently my best-long-term client pays $40...but I feel I want/deserve 60-70 and trying to land that for my next couple clients... do people pay you more than $40/hr for wordpress or do you just charge per project?

Depends - it ranges from 90/hr to several hundred or more. Some things aren’t priced hourly, instead I charge competitive market rates and focus on workflow/efficiency improvements for additional margin.

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

#168

Post by ovx99 »

jason_pomerleau wrote: post #16

There is lots of opportunity out there, but it depends on what you mean by ‘small business’. Super small companies (under 10 to 15 people in this context) are usually best off with SquareSpace or Wix. Companies slightly larger than this invariably end up wanting/needing things that these platforms can’t offer, and have the kind of budgets that can support a solo operator or small team. At this level, you are competin…

I've been doing wordpress sites as a side gig for a while but I'm stuck with really onboarding enough new clients who have enough budget to work with. Could you elaborate on how you get new clients as well as charging the rates you do? And it's all non-local clients or how many are local face-to-face type businesses? I live in the middle of nowhere so there's not even that option.

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

#169

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

danielvf wrote: post #140
skinnymuch wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But a good salary is pre-tax too unless you’re talking about the actual paycheck which is far lower than listed salary. There are benefits. Like matching 401K, paid vacation (though if this isn’t long enough it can be a negative), and mainly, health insurance. Those should be counted for a normal salaried job. Otherwise taxes should be compared the same way, no?

If you are self-employed in the US, you pay an additional tax before you even start your regular taxes, and this tax isn't affected by your personal deductions. You also need to pay for your own computers, SAAS services you use, etc. The more you make, the less this becomes an issue.

You can business expense just about anything. Also 50% of your Medicare and ss contributions if I remember correctly. Insurance premiums also 100% deductible.

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

#170

Post by vpmpaul »

In a word sorta, but if you are on HN you are probably overthinking it. A guy I work with looks for bad small business sites on the side then he tries to convince them to let him "redesign" the site. He then moves their site to WIX and loads a default template that they like. He charges $3000 USD for this. 99% of the work is non technical.
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