Find solution
When do you age out of a web design career?

a new career in web design...or am I being led astray?

  • So the work atmosphere at my current employer has been fairly toxic the last year. Actually the well was poisoned several years back when the department manager's wife was promoted from a secretarial assistant to a management position but that episode of nepotism another surreal story I won't get into. The final straw was the moment they re-structured my position, thereby giving me a $45,000 pay-cut while simultaneously asking me to do more work. I believe this led me to my current dire straits in my mid-career crisis in choosing whether I should embark on a totally new career opportunity or questionable legitimacy or whether I might be better off playing it safe. Please read on below... In any case, a co-worker and I conspired and made a pact to depart from our current employer with all due haste. Unfortunately, we, neither had success in out pursuits of a new job that would pay the same salary. This shouldn't be taken to mean we collect a particularly high salary. We don't. Then one day he comes to me and he says, "I know what we're going to do. We're going to be Web Designers!". Though I was somewhat surprised by this suggestion and somewhat hesitant, he then proceeded to sell me on a plan of starting a web design business, and I was indeed intrigued. By the end of this discussion I kept asking, "what's the catch?" Let me shorten the narrative here by laying out the scenario proposed. As you might have guessed, I feel somewhat sceptical of the business plan and thus somewhat conflicted. Having figured that some of you might have experience in this field, I would like to enquire if this is in actuality a viable career option and sound business proposition as it was explained to me. The scenario is as follows: An acquaintance of my co-worker specialises in SEO and Marketing, as well as writing the content for businesses on their websites. He is currently under contract that will be expiring shortly and wants to do this enterprise on his own. He proposes that we manage the clients for him after he does the initial sale and that we build the website and handle the revisions, while he handles the SEO and Content side. The business model entails that he signs the clients up on 6 month or yearly contracts. The business platform is run on Adobe Business Catalyst, which we can brand as our own service and then charge whatever he's sold the clients on per month. He says he's regularly been selling, well, I won't mention the prices but suffice it to say, people seem to be paying more in a month on one of these contracts than a lot of people pay in a one-off website deal altogether. He proposes that in 4-6 months, he can net 20 clients, which would be enough for one of us to quit our job. The other of us would follow sometime in the 4 months. Now the only thing that makes me feel this is somewhat dubious is, my research shows me that a lot of people are not paying that much for website design these days and neither my co-worker nor myself have much (if any) real experience in web design. So my first concern and question: Is this a real business model? How much will regular clients pay on a monthly basis for a website design with SEO and content? Could such a business support, say, 4 people, in a years time? Second question, do I really have any business being in Web Design? I work in a creative industry but Design and/or web design is not what I've been practicing. I did actually build a number of simple flash sites in the early 2000's for a number of friends who were in bands at the time. I remember one friend who was a tour manager mentioning that I should get into that business and that he had a lot of bands he could refer my way. I turned him down, because it seemed like a lot of work while all I wanted to do was chill (I was young) and because although people seemed impressed but what I did, I didn't consider myself a real web designer. Now, my co-worker and myself built one website so far, which we did in an attempt to get more free-lance jobs in our current industry. The SEO guy looked at it and said it was top-notch and he'd sell it as a high end site. It was basically a Parallax site done 100% in Muse. Neither of us Codes really. Though I'm sure I could still recall some basic HTML4 from my HTML class in 1998, when every one was using tables and frames instead of CSS and div layers, but rest assured, I'd be generally lost with todays web standards. My worker friend says we can go it alone 90% in Muse and learn anything else we need to along the way. We are both generally smart and technical guys so I half-way believe him. As far as design, I have been quietly studying and researching design philosophy and techniques the past few months. If it helps, I always wanted to work in Graphic Design when I was a teenager in the 90's. My mom had Micrografx on her computer and I was like on that thing 5 or 6 hours a day. I'd make flyers for friends bands and political posters, things like Martin Luther King with swastika for a mouth with a caption saying "Ignorance is not Bliss", and then I'd secretly put it up all over my high school. I didn't follow the career option of Graphic design because someone mistakenly told me I'd need to be able to draw really well to do that and despite the excess of art classes I took in High School, I was only good at modifying and adapting other's work as well as basic geometry, for my own designs. I loved the screen-printing shirts section of one art class. I did some wickedly intricate designs. We had like hundreds of magazines in the art store room (mostly Time and National Geographic) that I'd take elements from and trace onto paper and use for different stuff. My art teacher often criticised my work as non-original and subversive though and discouraged this. But anyway, I digress. Suffice it to say, I have an interest in Design. I can't code much as it is now. With Tools like Muse, do I really need to be able to? As I understand it, most of the tools we need are available as modules in Business Catalyst. There are tools for pulling CSS from Photoshop and Adobe is coming up with more and more Design UI based apps like Muse Edge Re-flow, and Edge Animate to aid in the design process while minimising coding. Not to mention there are hundreds of free tutorials for Dreamweaver out there. So my ultimate question here (which is now keeping me awake at nights) is do I take a chance and embark on this new career choice? I'm less than 2 years away from over the hill, so if I get this wrong, it could really spell disaster. It's a young persons industry out there. Or do I play it safe and stick with my employer for as long as they'll have me? I'd like to roll the dice and take a chance. I'm impulsive by nature. But I've got a mortgage of a half million dollars and a 15 month daughter to think of (and absolutely no savings!). I feel like I should be well advised on the viability of this potential career opportunity, especially at my age. BTW, if you've read this far, thank you. I'm not known for my brevity and I know it can be a fault. Perhaps I should consider a career in writing?

  • Answer:

    You don't have to code to put together a WP or Muse site. But as soon as the client says, "oh and I want to add a youtube video here and take off comments on the posts in the cooking category" then you need to be able to quickly dig into the code and make the changes you need. Doing that would take an experienced developer about 15 minutes. For someone who's never coded before, it could take all day. It might be that you need to work on having a group of developers that you could send the complex parts and so could get by that way. I don't think there's anything wrong with going down this path but give yourself 6 months or a year before you make any firm commitments or quit your job or anything like that to make sure it's really going to pan out. One website under your belt is definitely not enough to go on.

cicadaverse at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

Was this solution helpful to you?

Other answers

One of the most difficult parts of running your own web design company is that clients will bring in expectations and demands that would seem ridiculous to them in any other arena. Imagine being an architect if clients had no idea why four story mansions cost more than two bedroom cottages... or thought it was reasonable to ask you to build three or four homes and then they'd choose and pay for the one they like best... or came to you as you were completing the final paint touch ups and said they'd just driven past a houseboat and now they think they would like that instead... People do the equivalent to independent web designers all the time. ALL THE TIME. You would/will have to be prepared for that.

DirtyOldTown

Three thoughts: 1) If you are currently in a position that could absorb a $45,000 pay cut, I do not think that entry-level web design is going to provide you with income you consider satisfactory. 2) Yes: it is a young person's game. Plenty of middle aged and older people do quite well, but succeeding would require that you dedicate the kind of time, continuing education, and ceaseless focus on new technology that can compete with twentysomethings who aren't two years from over the hill and probably don't have kids and a mortgage. 3) Running your own web design business has at least as much "running your own business" to it as it does graphic design. Are you comfortable hunting down new clients? Taking endless meetings and trifling notes? Staying on top of people to make sure you get paid? Best of luck with whatever you choose.

DirtyOldTown

I sell web design for a living. 20 clients in 4-6 months sounds very optimistic to me. If by high end you mean corporate clients sending real money on their web infrastructure, most of them will take 4-6 months to make a decision, then another 4-6 months of meetings to actually get the site built. So unless he has a plan to bring clients from the current gig, which get ugly and litigious quickly, I don't see the growth happening that quick. You might be able to stir up 20 small biz clients that quickly, but their won't be enough revenue to go around. If you want to give it a shot do it on the side for a while first.

COD

My take on this is see how much of it you can do freelance on the side, and if all those customers and all that money materializes, great, you have a business! If not, you're making money on the side. Would I quit a job with benefits to chase this guy down the rabbit hole, no. Keep looking for better gigs.

Ruthless Bunny

As to finding clients, that's the SEO guy. He's pitched himself as a sales person. The second part of that is a warning. He's telling you what he thinks you want to hear so you'll buy his idea. I can't stress this enough. He is a salesman. He is selling you something. He is not giving you the whole story, and he is exaggerating what's possible re: clients and money to sell you his idea. Also, he's going to sell the clients a bunch of features and functionality he doesn't understand, that you can't deliver, without charging a reasonable amount for it or extending the deadlines. Small clients are a pain in the ass - they behave in ways that escalate costs rapidly, but they don't have the money to pay for the increased costs. They are unwilling or unable to change their behavior to control costs and they get insulted if you suggest they do. Big clients will be looking for full-service, meaning design and development. They won't hire your firm just to design. Unless you become a developer or partner with one you won't get big jobs. Everyone in the word thinks they can be a designer. This is not meant to question your talents - this is meant to warn you that the people who will hire you won't really value or respect what you do, because they think it's trivial. They also don't respect developers but for different reasons (they don't think they could do the job in the same way they think they could be designers, they just don't comprehend the work and they think it's merely pushing a magic button on the computer, i.e. they think it's trivial). As a beginner you'd have to be extraordinarily lucky to jump over that into the kind of client base the salesman is seducing you with. It's much more likely you'll have to slog through the same bullshit everyone else does in the field. tl:dr - this is a bad path to take to leave your current job. Minor possibility he's not, but if I had $100 to bet I'd put it on "The SEO guy is full of shit" without hesitation.

under_petticoat_rule

1) If you are currently in a position that could absorb a $45,000 pay cut, I do not think that entry-level web design is going to provide you with income you consider satisfactory. QFT!

missmagenta

As Dawkins_7 put it, I'm a "young whippersnapper" front-end dev, who came at things from a design background. I'm currently employed but freelanced out of college. Freelancing is hard. $62k in income? You take an automatic 7% paycut from self-employment taxes. Not to mention healthcare, and retirement contributions. And you can say goodbye to the idea of a 40hr work week, at least for several years. As to not knowing how to code? Yeah, it pains me deeply to say it, but plenty of people do this. I've encountered websites that were entirely image maps, generated by photoshop. I've been handed over legacy code that was made with frontpage or even MS Word that was such junk. To continue the architecture metaphors, it's like walking into a house where the walls were made with cake frosting and toothpicks instead of wood and plaster, and being asked to add a window to the wall. Then imagine explaining why it isn't possible to a client that doesn't know the difference between a 2x4 and a toothpick! And then I think back to the first few sites I made for clients. Fortunately due to the ephemeral nature of the web, few are still up, but I would be pretty embarrassed. You do need to learn somehow, and at least you're not a tattoo artist or something. First pancake and all. Anywho, I think your best course of action is to try and pursue this as a side job. Read as much about current best practices as you can. HTML/CSS/JQuery are not particularly difficult to learn, it's applying those skills correctly. If your client base doesn't know the difference? Well, thats to your advantage.

fontophilic

You say: "He says he's regularly been selling, well, I won't mention the prices but suffice it to say, people seem to be paying more in a month on one of these contracts than a lot of people pay in a one-off website deal altogether." and "He proposes that in 4-6 months, he can net 20 clients, which would be enough for one of us to quit our job." To me that says you're dealing with clients that are paying maybe a couple of hundred per month? This sounds like you'll be taking a minimum-wage job. I won't pretend to understand your motivation, because if I had gotten a $45k pay cut I would have been gone so fast they wouldn't have finished telling me about it. Look for a different job. See if you can get a temporary contract (6 month) somewhere else. In the meantime, do this new job on the side and decide if you like it, and if it can bring in the money you want.

blue_beetle

As people say, it's very hard to find well-paying freelance work. I've been a web developer for 15 years and I stick with an office job because I don't fancy trying to support myself off people who want to pay $12/hr because that's what a random Moldovan they found online would do it for. Obviously it's possible and people do it, but they spend years building up their client list. Also, the term "Web designer" is not really a term that is in use anymore. When the whole field was kind of new there was a lot of confusion about what the roles were so people used that to mean "someone who can throw together a site that works and doesn't look too bad." Personally, I know how to open Photoshop and pick colors that don't look awful together, but I would never call myself a "designer." I can throw something together but it's not going to be in the same ballpark as something from a serious designer who went to art school. Typically a developer and designer would work together in order to produce a site that works both technically and visually. Nowadays people are a graphic designer who happens to work on websites, or they are a developer (programmer). There is *some* overlap, like people who are designers but can do a bit of css to customize a Wordpress install, but basically they're two very opposite paths.

drjimmy11

Load more

Related Q & A:

Just Added Q & A:

Find solution

For every problem there is a solution! Proved by Solucija.

  • Got an issue and looking for advice?

  • Ask Solucija to search every corner of the Web for help.

  • Get workable solutions and helpful tips in a moment.

Just ask Solucija about an issue you face and immediately get a list of ready solutions, answers and tips from other Internet users. We always provide the most suitable and complete answer to your question at the top, along with a few good alternatives below.