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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?

#181

Post by Aeolun »

branweb wrote: post #166
ryandoom wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Reads more like ‘tough love’ to me. It’s harsh, but definitely well intentioned.

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

#182

Post by hello_newman »

throwjuly2018 wrote: post #175
vpmpaul wrote: post #170

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.

how does he convince the business to spend money just to redesign it and how big are his clients(10+ employees)? I was able to convince a client(3 person company) that he should have a website, but he just did it himself. Now he wants me to do seo and get more conversions which feels more like an art rather than science to me.

SEO is definitely a science. The formula is authoritive content + number of high quality backlinks = highly ranked site.

However, I do agree that there is a lot of bad information out there, but the process of googles algorithm for ranking sites (page rank) is pretty straight forward at the end of the day

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

#183

Post by hello_newman »

namanyayg wrote: post #103
no1youknowz wrote: post #9

I would ditch website design and move into marketing. Leads are what any business wants the most: - How to drive free traffic to sales funnels. - How to connect with a potential customers. - How to build the right audience for the product. - How to craft the sales message that resonates. - How to understand A/B/N metrics and speak in plain english to the business owner. I know of companies which do the entire process…

How would you recommend a web developer to learn & pick up these skills? Any books or courses?

If you’re looking for a course, Sam Ovens at consulting.com has a lot of good stuff.

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

#184

Post by juddlyon »

The best business model I've seen to service small businesses is to become a channel partners with Squarespace/Shopify/Wix/whoever, charge a fixed rate, and then optimize the hell out of your process to increase your margins.

Here's a few off the top of my head:

Shopify: https://ethercycle.com/

Squarespace: https://knapsackcreative.com/

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

#185

Post by nprateem »

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…

How do you disconnect? As a solo guy charging retainers for support, etc. how can you take a couple of weeks off? Do you always have to check your emails even when you're on holiday or do you have someone else who can hold the fort?

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

#186

Post by Jach »

michaelwda wrote: post #93
lowercased wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The kind of clients you want to work with will pay this without blinking. Sometimes they won't even know about the bill because it goes straight to AP. I agree #3, but on #2 - I've never dealt with any business of individual who operated like a blank check ("just send the bill to AP"). They all have budgets - implicit or explicit - and all want a rough idea of range at the very least. Is this a $3k project or a $20…

You're right on #2. To clarify, any clients I have that behave that way are firmly out of the SMB segment (or have grown to that point as we have worked together), seem to be in cash-flow heavy industries like manufacturing or construction, and we've been working together for several years. I think you made the point I was going for - it may be more hassle than it's worth to do work for a client that makes a fuss ove…

What's your strategy to avoid future work from such clients? I've thought the contract should include creating documentation for maintenance (e.g. login details to various services to update payment information or software versions or whatever) that the business can keep secured and that while you can be reached to perform certain kinds of maintenance at some fee you aren't obligated to. I had a friend in freelancing who self-hosted everyone on his own servers and charged an ongoing fee, though if I were a client I'd be nervous if the freelancer decided to raise their fee for the understandable reason that maintenance costs can increase.

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

#187

Post by a-saleh »

There is some money in doing more custom things. I.e. a friend of mine earned few thousand EUR by writing a website for a local conference, including registration, e.t.c.

I think that for the really small businesses, your lunch will be eaten by i.e. SquareSpace.

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

#188

Post by namanyayg »

hello_newman wrote: post #183
namanyayg wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you recommend a web developer to learn & pick up these skills? Any books or courses?

If you’re looking for a course, Sam Ovens at consulting.com has a lot of good stuff.

Looks interesting. Have you enrolled in any course in the past? Any other resources you could recommend? Thanks!

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

#189

Post by kayoone »

jason_pomerleau wrote: post #81
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?

I do both, and I’m not actually super awesome at either. It turns out to be less important than many think. My design work is professional, but isn’t going to win any awards. My dev skills are pretty good within the context of WordPress - there isn’t much I haven’t done on that platform. But I’m pretty sure I’d be laughed out of the room at a Google or FB. I was a senior engineer at a BigCo but my role there was more…

love how self reflected and content you are about your situation. Kudos!

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

#190

Post by aliswe »

pacomerh wrote: post #178
mxuribe wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...over 200k last year building, fixing and maintaining..., working from home in a region with a relatively low cost of living... THIS! My goal is to move away from my full-time day job and concentrate fully on my current side hustle...and arriving at or close to where you are now - both income and low expenses/cost-of-living, etc. Even if i'm a little under the 200k, that's squarely within my goal. I applaud you o…

I'd hate to call it "hustle"

"Side hustle" is some kind of SV slang for money-making side project. The SV-specific part is that it's not meant in a dishonest or otherwise negative (rather humoristic) way.
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