July 4th, 2007 by 
mark
Lately I have had a really bad effort block…and haven’t been doing as much work as I should be.
Whats an ‘effort block’ you ask? well, its the same as a creative block but for effort. I like to use that term as opposed to ‘lazy’, doesn’t make me feel so bad.
Anyways I have been doing a lot of work lately on side projects and thought I might share my findings. As of about a month ago I came to the conclusion that for a Web Design company to survive (without already having a large established client base) there needs something else. In my local city there is so many web design companies, this is mainly because people seem to think if they know HTML then they are a web designer (and basically they are) and it shows when you look at their portfolio, but this post isn’t to flame crappy designers.
What this post is about is this, for you to survive you can’t rely on clients. I recently read a post on SitePoint.com and to sum it up it says that how to land good/big clients you can’t be a ‘technican’ but you have to be a business person. To sell yourself you don’t (saying that I’m this and that I can do that, basically self promotion) but instead telling them how much better you can make life for them and how easy it is to work with you. This brings me back to my point that as a small web design company you can’t focus on web design. This is because to land the big fish you have to spend a large amount of time pitching and working on getting the projects as opposed to working on the project. But the problem is, if you are a small (a few people) business then spending time on pitching, etc. and not actually building websites then you will soon notice the bank account balance go down.
What can I do to fix this? well, (this is what I have been getting to slowly…sorry) you can do you own in-house projects to help bring in the money, if you are not keen on starting a website up and trying to build its momentum then try going to the SitePoint.com Marketplace for a website to buy, you would be surprised at what you can get for under $1000. Once you have a website you can then monitize it (if not already monitized) and use that to help pay the bills. Many people think that this is stupid because its such a small amount of money but if you work on your websites you can get a considerable amount. I have been reading a blog lately about a guy that has small handful of average size sites (under 6 I think) and he is making 3500 each month. Then when you consider the lump sum amount you could get if you sold your site on something like the SitePoint.com’s Marketplace.
This matters when you only get a couple sales or less a month and those sales are only for a small company website. I hope this helps you if your running or thinking of starting a web design business. Don’t do it because you are a web designer (if thats your reason the go freelance) but do it because you like doing business and managing a business because you will find that its less and less web design and more and more managing the business and dealing business relationships.
