What Advice Could You Give on Beginning Web Design

[MCDIT]

In my area I've found web design to be a bit of a shady business. The average needs of businesses tends to be very small, yet they all seem to fall into the extreme of two categories. There are only a few web design businesses nearby that are well established. Two, it seems, are on the high side of the pay scale (£1000+) and one presumably on the elite scale (not advertising prices but having done work for some pretty big places).

On the other hand, there are multitudes of fly-by-night web designers. It seems that these are what the great majority are familiar with, in my experience.

Up until now, any time I have been asked about web design I have referred them elsewhere and helped them along with the process. These rare occasions were fairly informal and the help I gave were more or less favours - being sure to distance myself from them but work as a bit of a middle man. Apart from the bigger designers, I have used a local fellow that started his own business in this field particularly, an old school chum straight out of university and a friend that did some pretty impressive work for a local machinery business. Every one of them were problematic.

What I would like to do, ideally, is insert myself into this game as a more reliable mid-range. I could only imagine that this would be a great way to get my foot in the door for tech support and managed services. Done right, of course. All of my website experience put together: I'm acquainted with creating sites through Wordpress and the basic use of Magento. I'm semi-familiar with using WHM, Cpanel & Phpmyadmin but that's all.

As far as I would have no problems putting something together for someone through Wordpress, I understand there's probably a little more I ought to be able to do before offering it professionally. I have no problems with putting in time to study, but at the moment I have no idea on where to start.

Any advice you could give me on how to go about this properly would be very much appreciated.

Darran

 

[Y.F.N.C.G.]

I similarly started offering web services in my computer consulting business and after about 3 years realized I loved web development more than IT services so now I do web consulting full-time.

The thing you should keep in mind that as long as you're able to deliver a product that the client is happy with and that you make a profit on, it doesn't necessarily matter how in-depth your knowledge is. Look at what those other "fly by night" guys are doing wrong and provide a service that does better. 90% of the time the client doesn't care what platform it's on or how it was built, as long as it looks how they want it to look and functions how they want it to function, and most of the time all that means is "does it get me results?".

The way I did it was, I started off building sites for clients that were within my wheelhouse (no custom development, no ecommerce) and eventually, as I started becoming more confident in my web development skills, I started increasing my prices and taking on more complex projects.

TL;DR Just start doing it and learn as you go.

 

[MCDIT]

Excellent advice, thank you very much!

 

[NETWizz]

I would advise having adaptive technology; since, it is the law. Not just elevator ramps, but your website needs to support those who are impaired otherwise you can be sued in the litigious States of America.

 

[MCDIT]

I would advise having adaptive technology; since, it is the law. Not just elevator ramps, but your website needs to support those who are impaired otherwise you can be sued in the litigious States of America.

I hadn't heard of this before.

 

[allstarit]

I have found the easiest way is to buy a cheap domain, hosting and have a play with WordPress. This is how i started doing it. Im by no means an expert but i found some good guides online about how to build word press. I build my site https://allstarcomputers.com.au and at first it looked very basic but over years i have tweaked it, changed themes- also purchased the Technibble website review and got alot of good feedback from this and have used it on my website along with some of my client sites. im happy with my site at the moment although im sure there is things i can tweak and will do when i find time.

The thing i have found is for it to generate traffic you need to keep updating the content - i have a blog section where i create blogs and then share this on facebook. Video Content is my next thing to add to the site. This is what customers love:- video content and current articles.