MAKE MONEY ONLINE

Quite a few aspiring website designers have been asking me for advice lately.Perhaps it's because they've noticed that website design is now a service offered at my site. For starters, let me clear one thing up. Although I personally tend to the site (you may be able to tell from the simple layout!) I do not personally handle client sites. I have a website designer who handles those accounts. And yes, offering this service has forced me to learn quite a bit about the subject. Today I'll share that knowledge with you. Here's a step-by-step guide to starting your own successful web design business...
Step 1: Get the Tools
Before you can offer web design you need to fill your design toolbox! While you can spend a ton of cash in this phase, the best strategy is to acquire the bare minimum, at least until you have a few clients under your belt. When we decided to offer web design, it took about $2500 to get started. That covered a new iMac, (while many designers use a PC, we went with Mac since we do both web and print design) a scanner, and lots of software.As far as software goes, we went with the Adobe suite of design tools. This included Adobe Illustrator, PhotoShop, and Quark for print design jobs such as book covers and catalogs. While Adobe turned out to be a solid choice, many other designers work with straight html or WYSIWYG editors such as FrontPage, HomeSite, HotDog and more. Whatever tool you are most comfortable with will do.Just be prepared to make ongoing purchases. Since we got started, my designer has invested in lots more software such as BBEdit, Mac FTP software, DreamWeaver by MacroMedia, a high end printer, a drawing tool and more. Remember, being a web designer means keeping your arsenal of design tools current.
Step 2: Practice, practice!
Before you open for business, you need to put in some serious design time! Start by putting together your own website, where you will offer your services. Use all the tools at your disposal and make sure you know how to perform every service you plan to offer.While your own site should be simple enough to navigate quickly, you should also show off some of your skills. Post some sample logos or sites if you can. Rather than "tell" prospective customers what you are capable of doing, show them!
Step 3: Decide on Pricing
How much should you charge for your design services? Well, the answer to that question really comes down to two equations; your skill level and the amount you need to make.As to the skill level, you can get a good idea where you stand by surfing the web a little. Go to your favorite search engine and enter "website design". You'll find designers that charge anywhere from $25 to $250 per web page and a few hundred to tens of thousands for an entire site. Check out their work. Is yours comparable?Next consider the amount of time it will take you to design a basic 10 page website. Remember to factor free consultation with your client (this can take hours), the design of a basic theme, buttons for navigation, and a logo. These are the items usually included in a basic website design package. Once you've figured out how many hours it will take to put all this together, figure out how much you need to make per hour. Too many would-be designers do not take this step and end up doing their first few jobs for less than $10 an hour. If you can pay the bills with that, then by all means, go for it. But more than likely you'll need to make much more than that.Also remember that design jobs can take up to 50% longer than originally anticipated. Factor that in too. You are better off starting your pricing a bit on the high side. You can always have a sale when things are a bit slow.Also, don't forget to set up pricing for extras that can take a bit longer to complete. Things like rollover buttons, popups, fill out forms or other cgi scripts can lead to hours of tweaking. You may find that an hourly rate for these extras is the best way to go.
Step 4: Prepare Your Contracts and Open for Business!
Since website design is a time-consuming task, you are going to need to protect yourself. I know of one gentleman designer who received payment for only one of the first five websites he designed. We too have been the victim of a non-paying client. It's not fun.The best way we have found to guard against problems is to require pre-payment of at least a 50% deposit before any work is started. You should also require each and every client to sign a contract. The contract does not have to be anything fancy. It just needs to protect you from liability and clearly state what your client gets and for how much. Once you have all the components above in place, you can open for business. And remember, don't forget about your local market. Many designers find that it is far easier to get clients locally than on the web, where competition is fierce. Put together a small brochure or even a business card. Offer discounts to residents of your state or town. Show them you appreciate their business and you may be surprised how many jobs can come from one good local referral.
Step 5: Offer Web Hosting and ongoing site maintenance to your design customers.
If you are serious about your web design business, this step is the key to your long-term survival. The fact is, a good percentage of your design clients will not want to deal with the technical aspects such as uploading and maintaining the website you designed for them. This is where your expertise can translate into a potentially lucrative residual income stream. Here's how...Find a reliable web host that offers "virtual hosting". In a nutshell, virtual hosting means that you can add domains to your web hosting account for a very small fee. I use Virtualis for this. When I started offering design services I was already hosting this bizweb2000 site on a Virtualis Mega account. With that package I could add additional domains for just $5 per month. So offering web hosting to my design clients was simple.I have since upgraded to a dedicated server and now pay just one dollar per month for virtual domains. While the expense of my dedicated server is higher, it gives me a ton of space for my own site and nearly unlimited growth potential.Over the next year I anticipate adding an average of two design/hosting customers to my server each month. While that may not sound like much, a year from now I would have over 30 virtually hosted customers. And each one of these design customers is happy to pay from $29.95 to $89.95 a month for a rich feature set that would cost them hundreds of dollars a month elsewhere. With an average of $50 a month coming in from these design customers, that's 30 X $50 = $1500 per month. Of course my designer gets half of that for maintaining the websites, but in your case you may be doing it all and earning it all.
Now stretch that out over 2, 3 or 4 years. Can you see the profit potential of hosting your clients sites and maintaining them?Just be careful about offering too much in the way of maintenance/changes over each yearly period. Limit the number of hours you'll spend on each site. We do this by offering different hosting/site maintenance packages. Customers who anticipate lots of changes basically pre-pay by opting for the higher priced hosting/site maintenance package.
OK, I'm probably getting into far more detail than most of you need at your early startup stage. I'll cool it. The bottom line is this... when starting your own web design business, think about where you want to be in 3, 4 or 5 years. Rather than just working from design job to design job, open up some back-end revenue. Hosting is just one way to do it. Use your imagination and open more. Consider offering monthly marketing packages to your design clients. These can include regular search engine submissions, ezine ad campaign management and much more.As you can see, web design is a great way to open up multiple income sources. You truly are limited only by your imagination. If you've ever considered starting your own web design business, you now have a step-by-step tutorial on getting started, and getting creative!

Posted in: on Saturday, 19 April 2008 at at 10:58