General Discussions

**TheDon** · 02-11-2010, 08:00 AM

Hi All,
I am thinking of opening a website design company as I have been offered a lot of business over the past month promoting my website (which is not much) and I would like to know what I need o prepare for it.

I have only been doing web design for 7 months, I know HTML and CSS very well, I have done a very good SEO training course and have got my friends website into the top 3 google searches (will have to work on mine now)

I have a good friend who knows HTML, CSS, PHP very well, do you think this will be sufficent? Anyone on here started up a simular company before?

**edgray** · 02-11-2010, 09:42 AM

well, the more services you offer, the more likely you are to be able to get clients. What I mean is offering PHP, MySQL, Flash, SEO, HTML & CSS.

What you might want to do is specialise in one area, say, HTML & CSS and partner with other freelancers offering complimentary services such as Flash and so forth.

**VirtuosiMedia** · 02-11-2010, 10:59 AM

In my experience so far, you'll need a few things.

A written agreement between you and you partner detailing responsibilities and revenue sharing.
A contract for between you and your potential clients. This should also be as detailed as possible.
A good website with a portfolio. It doesn't have to be a huge portfolio (or even website, for that matter), but you need to have something. I'd recommend at least 3 portfolio items. If you don't have customer sites for your portfolio at first, create templates, additional site for yourself, or do some pro bono work for friends.
A plan for how you're going to continually get new customers.
A plan for how you're going to deal with a larger workload than you can both handle.
Do as much prep work as possible. Anything that you can setup that you can automate or reuse will save you time and increase your profit margins per job.
Don't compete on price, compete on quality of work and service. The lower paying clients are almost always more trouble than they're worth. Raise your prices any time you start getting more work than you can handle.

**TheDon** · 02-12-2010, 02:07 AM

Thanks for the info guys,
I think I am just going to jump into it and see what happens, I can get workers pretty cheap here if I need it, I will also contact another company and will ask them if they can do some of the work if we are overloaded and they can take a percentage of the profits.