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Is there anyone making money...

B

BWRpota

Well-Known Member
...designing websites for clients?
A. There seems to be a pervading notion that EVERYONE is designing websites, making it that much more difficult to...
1) ...get business
2) ...be paid satisfactorily for one's services
Economics 101:)
Designing websites, at least for some "side money", seems to be approaching the experience of mowing lawns for some extra cash (...and I'm far too creative for doing that).
1) A lawn mower, weed wacker, and blower is easy and fairly inexpensive to obtain (as is software and a decent laptop);).
(so are clients interested only in getting something for nothing.
2) It seems there are so many out there who merely dabble in "landscape maintenance" (web design)

Is anyone out there actually making money designing websites? :confused:
 
I was doing it along with my regular video production work. The difference is-- once I finish a video, the client gets their product and it's done. But a website.... a good chunk of clients are going to hound you when something goes wrong, even if you stated in your contract that you were only designing the website, not maintaining it.

Which brings another point-- if you only plan to do this on the side or for a little while, I recommend you making your clients purchase their domain name on their own account and pay for their own hosting on their own account. That makes it easier when they come blaming you for something.

I worked with a guy who was doing this as one of many business ventures (which is fine, it's what I do to a smaller degree). He was providing the domain name purchase and hosting under his own accounts (Godaddy and hosting company) for "forever" (ie as long as the company was still going). Well if you are making a finite amount of money with no maintenance fees, $20 a year for a domain with privacy will eventually mean you made no money of the job. So any way, I brought one client in during this venture. We made the website, yadda yadda, it went fine. Me and the guy moved on to other work, and I get a call from the lady later on that their site has been hacked or something. Frantic. It turned out that my buddy there hadn't paid the fees on the domain name and when you went to it, you were just getting a splash page that had links to stuff that was similar to what the domain name was. The company name has an innocent word in it that is also a symbol for a certain community, so all of the links when you went to the domain name were about finding g*y men to date or "be with" that night. So that was a bad experience. The next year, he did the exact same thing, and didn't pay (it may have been hosting this time), and I just had to say I was sorry and tell them that it was his deal.. if it was me, it never would have happened.

And even though those weren't actually from being hacked like they thought, that is something to keep in mind. And if you installed a website that didn't have good security (or even if you did) then yeah, that might be your job to fix. And then they might hold you liable for it.

There's small companies that do mostly website work, and they do a great job and make good money. It's always a team of people, though,and they can charge modestly. It just seems like people like you and me who try to do it on their own get burned quickly for one reason or another and don't stick with it. So that's just my $.02.
 
Great advice. I would stream-line my offerings to potential clients...templates and such, basically simplify the work necessary to get websites up and running, charging a nominal fee. In short, make my money in volume, gaining experience and exposure along the way.
Once a client's website of your creation has been hacked, how to fix it? Is this as simple as somehow saving a copy of the website in your web editor, then re-uploading? But this would mean uploading the same website with the same vulnerability. What to do then?
 
Sounds good as far as streamlining the process. Will you be using a content management system like WordPress or Joomla? I would recommend either one of those.

As far as fixing a hacked site-- I haven't the slightest idea what would be the best way to fix it.
 
I have made a few websites, I made one for the place I use to work at and gave it to them free of charge.. it was a grocery store, but they didn't want to pay me to keep it regularly maintained so they decided to just start from scratch ... and now its quite a bit of a depressing website. I helped in the layout of the page and creating process of the new one and charged them accordingly .. but now it is kept up by 2 people that don't know the first thing about HTML
I have also assisted other maintain websites for a really small price, make special features for them to use like drop down navigation menus and other misc tools. One person that I assist frequently makes a pretty decent amount of money he has quite a few clients and his rate is pretty steep, but he is one of the only people in his area that offers this type of service.
If you would like to dabble in web design I would suggest setting up a couple full functioning sample sites, either hosted locally on a laptop that you can bring to potential clients, or host it online and you can send your potential clients a link. This is to show people what your sites can be capable of.
 
RE: hacked sites.

Basically, if a site gets hacked, a couple of things can happen. The server's data could have been breached (bad), and/or the site could have been defaced (not too bad). Now, there are more, but these are the more common ones.

Regardless of what happened, you'll likely not be responsible for it. It would be that company's IT staff. If you are going to do it, a) get paid, and b) make sure you fix the whole that they got it with. And check for changes to the system files and extra ports running on that box.

;D
 
TheyCallMeBT said:
Sounds good as far as streamlining the process. Will you be using a content management system like WordPress or Joomla? I would recommend either one of those.

As far as fixing a hacked site-- I haven't the slightest idea what would be the best way to fix it.
Click to expand...
In plain-speak (please), just what the !@>?# does Wordpress do?
 
BWRpota said:
In plain-speak (please), just what the !@>?# does Wordpress do?
Click to expand...

They are basically a scripted templated content creation system. You enter your information into a pre-designed set of html templates and the pages are generated. The plus side is they look pretty good and don't require a lot of technical knowledge. The downside is that they end up looking like everybody else and you can't to a whole lot of specialization or customization.
 
lunatic59 said:
They are basically a scripted templated content creation system. You enter your information into a pre-designed set of html templates and the pages are generated. The plus side is they look pretty good and don't require a lot of technical knowledge. The downside is that they end up looking like everybody else and you can't to a whole lot of specialization or customization.
Click to expand...
...explained quite clearly...thank you. If I used original illustrations, .gifs, Flash
animations and such, this might negate the commonality of these templates, yes?
 
Only to a certain point. The thing is that by the time you've put in the effort to shoehorn some uniqueness into a template, you probably could have created a discrete site which doesn't tie you to any particular system.
 
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