Web Developers Perspective (I'm mad >:/)

Okay. I've been struggling to get a job for almost 3 months. About a week ago, a local company hired me as a Web Developer. Now what they basically do, is purchase templates, fill in content, and rank. That's it. It's a team of about 20 incompetent people who literally take weeks just to configure a WordPress blog (setup the plugins, wp-config, load databases, etc). I'm over in the front, coding away like there is no tomorrow.

There were a couple of documents I found while uploading a clients website. I found some sales pitche PDF's. Basically, they buy the pre-existing templates for a couple hundred, and sell them for about 6k-8k. I've only been working two weeks, but everyday I think to myself "...I can run circles around these guys. Why am I not making thousands a week?". Am I wrong to be upset about this? I've also scoured the Craigslist postings, and there are literally hundreds of "Websites for $100!", and "Blogs for $70! Up and running in 48 hours!!!!". It's like really? Really?

I have the skillset. I just don't have the business portion of it. How do people find clients? I doubt Craigslist is the way to go. How do I make a name for myself, instead of looking like some spam shit-tier company that anyone with basic web knowledge could identity. Of all the websites I checked, none adhered to web standards. Page optimization was a joke, and the graphic design was that of middle school children. I'm being paid $9/hr to make someone thousands, when I could be doing this myself (I could probably churn out about 5-8 fully coded designs a week). Can anyone give any insight? Would this be a viable option? They aren't even blackhat, their borderline stupidhat.

</endrant>

There are tons of ebooks and WSOs in the downloads section about how to find offline clients, check it out. Build yourself a nice corporate site and a portfolio of pretty example sites and then get out there and start knocking down doors!

Maybe reading my post here will help you when you decide to choose your clients. As far as sales, there are more things involved.


If you need additional help beyond that, feel free to contact me. My contact details are in my profile.

First change your attitude.
You say you have the skillset but not the business portion of it. So you have nothing that should earn you more than $9/h. Have you actually noticed that e.g. G is not adhering to web standards? I doubt it. A great webdesigner should know the ins and outs of the mastodons in his line of work.

I am sure H. Ford never knew how to assemble a car. He probably could learn it but why bother? He had drones who thought they knew a lot more about that and they did. But that was the wrong attitude

Don't make the mistake to try and impress an employer to infinity, he'd see you as a great peon to have. Do it with prospective clients instead.

How do you find rich clients? By word of mouth. How do you find the first one? By making the same effort like when you are searching for poor clients. The only difference: you put up $1k as a price instead of $100. The rest is a matter of luck: the right guy finding your gig at the right moment. These moments are pretty frequent nowadays.

Rich players don't mind high prices. Subconsciously they even prefer to pay more. Lawyers (just an example) gladly pay 5x more for a cleaning agency instead of going to craig's hunting for janitors. That's the agency's job. And you are the janitor in your current job.

My advice is keep doing what you're doing in order to sustain yourself for the time being but constantly look for chances to change that. And don't even think of stealing their customer database, you may even land in jail

The rest is kicking ass and chewing bubblegum (if you got what it takes; see above).