Freelance Web Design

Russ86

Russ86

New member
May 8, 2009
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San Diego
Not making enough money doing SEO at the moment so I've decided to start doing some web design locally. Just wondering if anyone on here has any personal experience in this area and would be willing to offer some insight. Please keep the "good luck bro." comments to a minimum. I realize working with clients is a pain in the ass, but I'm willing to try and suck it up.

As far as my skills go, I would say I'm well rounded, very good with HTML and CSS, so-so with PHP, pretty good with photoshop. great with wordpress, built only a couple of websites with Drupal, but it seemed pretty straight forward. Design aspects of a website aren't really a problem, but I might outsource the actual logos, as they make up about half of initial impression of a website imo, and I'm not phenomenal at creating them.

Anyway, fire away.
 


I believe there has been multiple threads about this.

Anyway, as your just in it for the money, I suggest not bothering with actually designing the sites. Use wordpress and use templates. Before you begin find out exactly how many pages they want, what sort of style they would like and get the content from them. You can bang out the website in a couple hours, including changing the template to look less like a blog and more like a website (don't show you've completed it for atleast 2-3 days but definitely keep them 'updated')

I've never dealt with anybody that hasn't like the design I've provided them with, though others will show them a few different designs to begin with and they can pick. If you provide them with something they don't like, but it fits the style they wanted, charge them extra for finding something else.

If you were wanting to put more effort into it, I'd buy alot of hosting and charge them up the ass the for hosting and "maintenance", but if your not in it for the long haul I wouldn't bother. If you don't want to do that, give them an aff link to a decent hosting provider.

Offer other shit at extra cost, Facebook page, twitter background design, gallery, SEO etc

As for marketing, I don't really have too many ideas, I'd be interested to hear your/others thought on this. I'm still intend on printing off business cards and putting them up in local shop windows, if I did enough it should hopefully convert a few a month but not lots. Word of mouth will get you a fair amount of business if you treat your clients well. People will probably say talk to business owners/attend local business owners meetings.

Haven't tried any online advertising - ranking yourself for 'web design cityname' probably wouldn't be a waste of time though ;)
 
CitizenSmif said:
I believe there has been multiple threads about this.

Anyway, as your just in it for the money, I suggest not bothering with actually designing the sites. Use wordpress and use templates. Before you begin find out exactly how many pages they want, what sort of style they would like and get the content from them. You can bang out the website in a couple hours, including changing the template to look less like a blog and more like a website.

I've never dealt with anybody that hasn't like the design I've provided them with, though others will show them a few different designs to begin with and they can pick. If you provide them with something they don't like, but it fits the style they wanted, charge them extra for finding something else.

If you were wanting to put more effort into it, I'd buy alot of hosting and charge them up the ass the for hosting and "maintenance". If not, give them an aff link to a decent hosting provider.

Offer other shit at extra cost, Facebook page, twitter background design, gallery, SEO etc
Click to expand...

Yeah -- I agree with this post... Wordpress is one of the best CMS's for someone in your position (or really anyone that does internet marketing)... They are easy to learn, easy to edit, and you can pretty much do anything with them if you have the right imagination.

Perhaps you can start by building a couple of sites for people at a discounted rate and then build up your portfolio -- or even build up some for yourself and learn more things about SEO -- Kill two birds with one stone. This way, when you do have interested buyers, you can show them your work.

And 100% agreed about the affiliate link hosting. If I am not mistaken, I see a few services like this on CraigsList offering cheap web design for small businesses... How they make most of their money is referring them to HostGator or something like that and getting $50 per sale.

Good luck man! You seem to have been around these forums for a while, so take advantage of it, read as much as you can, and learn learn learn!
 
Can't edit anymore but here is a good example of why wordpress pwns manual creation.

I was asked for a feature so the client could edit pages themselves. I was building on WP anyway but I told them I'd implement a backend for them so they could edit pages. I charged extra for giving them the WP login and making a document which outlines how to edit posts. Once you've made that document you can just use it over and over again. 100% profit for simply giving them the WP login.

Obviously if they don't ask, you'll probably make more money not mentioning it and just charging them every time they want a change. But again, it comes down to being dedicated to the business for the extra cash.
 
CitizenSmif said:
I believe there has been multiple threads about this.

Anyway, as your just in it for the money, I suggest not bothering with actually designing the sites. Use wordpress and use templates. Before you begin find out exactly how many pages they want, what sort of style they would like and get the content from them. You can bang out the website in a couple hours, including changing the template to look less like a blog and more like a website (don't show you've completed it for atleast 2-3 days but definitely keep them 'updated')

I've never dealt with anybody that hasn't like the design I've provided them with, though others will show them a few different designs to begin with and they can pick. If you provide them with something they don't like, but it fits the style they wanted, charge them extra for finding something else.

If you were wanting to put more effort into it, I'd buy alot of hosting and charge them up the ass the for hosting and "maintenance", but if your not in it for the long haul I wouldn't bother. If you don't want to do that, give them an aff link to a decent hosting provider.

Offer other shit at extra cost, Facebook page, twitter background design, gallery, SEO etc

As for marketing, I don't really have too many ideas, I'd be interested to hear your/others thought on this. I'm still intend on printing off business cards and putting them up in local shop windows, if I did enough it should hopefully convert a few a month but not lots. Word of mouth will get you a fair amount of business if you treat your clients well. People will probably say talk to business owners/attend local business owners meetings.

Haven't tried any online advertising - ranking yourself for 'web design cityname' probably wouldn't be a waste of time though ;)
Click to expand...

Some good ideas here, I like the whole 'I will install a back-end' thing for wordpress, I was lol'ing.

However, this is actually something I want to set up for a more long-term venture. At least until I have enough passive income rolling in. I have a few legitimate websites already built, one for a production company that does commercial work (kind of a portfolio based website), a small clothing line, and a couple of my own sites.

My goal here though isn't necessarily mass production, I want to build solid reputation/deliver quality so that I can end up charging premium $... Though that being said, I plan on outsourcing some of the designs once business starts to bloom. I don't know how long I'll be doing it, but if I am going to do it, I want to do it right. I would rather bank 2000 dollars off of one client and deliver a website that I am proud of... than 2000 dollars off of 5 clients for shit I essentially copy-pasted from the web. Both would probably take the same amount of time.

As for the hosting aspect, I will most likely aim to host all of clients' websites on my own server(s). Reasons being, the majority of them aren't going to be drawing large amounts of traffic, and I can also profit from hosting and 'maintenance' fees. As well as tacking on a premium monthly cost for 'site updates' they will probably never use. Like charge a base hosting fee of $25 dollars per month with a $10/page fee for updating content, and then offer an alternative of $75/month but it comes with 15 content updates every month. Those may not be the exact rates, but you get the idea... still have to do some local market research regarding that.

And yes, I'll definitely be offering other services like PPC, SEO, etc.

As far as marketing goes, I have a few ideas. The first is to include a footer link in every single site that I create. This will play hand in hand with offering quality and charging premium prices because this will attract more 'authoritative' clients that will be backlinking straight to my domain.. The websites that I see ranking in the top 3 for 'mycity web design' all implement this strategy', I'm definitely not going to be leaving it out.

Business cards, craigslist, newspaper ads (wait, do people still read these.. lol), PPC campaigns that target local terms for potential buyers. For the offline stuff especially I'll try to place business cards, flyers, etc. in places where people with money tend to frequent, this will require a bit of brain-storming.

That's pretty much the plan right now, I have my site domain pretty much completed in photoshop, just have to code it all out. The only area where I have yet to do any research is the paperwork aspect, more specifically the legal shit... contracts and shit that will protect me.
 
william3964 said:
chakree is one of the fastest growing Professional freelance Web Design freelancer in India, based in Hyderabad. By leveraging the latest technological innovations, I can provide high quality innovative Web-based solutions across diverse platforms..

---------------------------------------------------------
Medical Billing Software
Click to expand...

^ This. Good luck bro.
 
We are a web developer who have many experience in wordpress. We are almost 1 year as a web developer and many wordpress site has been develop. We know how to creat wordpress templates and install it using ftp or fantatico. We have a team that will made the SEO. We are for web development and the other is for SEO. We have many experience in this field because we are came from outsourcing company that has SEO and web development service.

We have no domain yet,but i am using free hosting for my portfolio.

Here it is:

iWork Services

bernz110.byethost13.com

box12.host1free.com/~bernab/bernz/

We have affordable VA for all of our services.
 
We are a web developer who have many experience in wordpress. We are almost 1 year as a web developer and many wordpress site has been develop. We know how to creat wordpress templates and install it using ftp or fantatico. We have a team that will made the SEO. We are for web development and the other is for SEO. We have many experience in this field because we are came from outsourcing company that has SEO and web development service.

We have no domain yet,but i am using free hosting for my portfolio.

Here it is:

iWork Services

bernz110.byethost13.com

box12.host1free.com/~bernab/bernz/

We have affordable VA for all of our services.
 
I'm pushing almost a mil a year in building websites/seo for businesses and flipping my personal websites as well on the side.

One of the greatest resources I can give you is Sharebrain

Can't tell you how many times it's saved my ass.

other obvious resources that make your life easier

- Wickedfire buy/sell (amit / river / content writer / logo designer)
- Fiverr (very few, but there are some that are amazing in building facebook/twitter for site flip)
- deviantart (their psd resources kick ass)
- themeforest (if you're building through wordpress)
- master local seo and tactics for local businesses. You only need one kick ass reference and you're gold.

hope it helps broski
 
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Adding things such as seo, fb pages, YouTube channels, and paid traffic are always great ways to upsell. Selling seo can sometimes be a bit intimidating since you don't see instant results (usually). I like upselling paid traffic because it shows instant results and you can make some reoccurring profit by continuing it. Grab an adwords coupon and tell them the first 50 or so is on you if they want to give it a go.
 
Also...I usually can get $100 or so by selling an HTML email stationary. Make sure they are inline and test them- use the website as a base design. Sometimes you can knock these out in 15 mins and snag some extra cash.
 
tavin said:
I'm pushing almost a mil a year in building websites/seo for businesses and flipping my personal websites as well on the side.

One of the greatest resources I can give you is Sharebrain

Can't tell you how many times it's saved my ass.

other obvious resources that make your life easier

- Wickedfire buy/sell (amit / river / content writer / logo designer)
- Fiverr (very few, but there are some that are amazing in building facebook/twitter for site flip)
- deviantart (their psd resources kick ass)
- themeforest (if you're building through wordpress)
- master local seo and tactics for local businesses. You only need one kick ass reference and you're gold.

hope it helps broski
Click to expand...

Hey, thanks a lot man, couldn't imagine pushing that much $ with this, haven't considered the local SEO as much, perhaps I should.

d_diggler said:
Wordpress is PHP and MySQL, so so with php didn't mention MySQL but great with WP?

Good luck bro.
Click to expand...

lolrly? I say I'm great with wordpress because, while I might not be able to hard code from scratch using PHP, I can customize the shit out of a wordpress install. Just using basic functions, hooks, and filters, I can take plugins and modify them to my liking, adding functionality where I want it. You can be very familiar with a PHP based CMS without being extremely well-versed in PHP itself. For that matter, the fact that you don't know this makes me question your experience in anything I just mentioned. gtfo.
 
Russ86 said:
... built only a couple of websites with Drupal, but it seemed pretty straight forward...
Click to expand...

Never heard anyone say that before. I struggled quite a bit at first but after getting the hang of Drupal I feel it is pretty awesome. Still, Wordpress is the gravy train for what you are trying to do.
 
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