SOOO, I have this customer who really wants to update hi s website, and asked me to find a designer.
For the record, I have about as much creativity ias Rosseanne Barr has class. I called on Aakshey dto work up some mockups for this customer.
Since this customer really liked the colors on his site, and they are hideous, I asked Aakshey to give me a few mock ups, one in those colors, then to use his experience to come up with 2 more.
In a couple of days I got 5 mockups from Aakshey, not three, one was in the original colors, and 4 others that were not.
This is the customers response:
(emphasis is mine)
I looked at the mock ups you sent me and the most I like is #4. The blue and pistachio color combinations are very modern and attractive. I also like the lay out of the page. The only thing I don't like to much is the lady in the picture, I guess you can find something better. (its a placeholder graphic where a whiteboard vid will go)
About the logo: I decided to have you take care of it too, and I have no problems in accept something different. Keep the idea of something modern and attractive.
Forget the purple/yellow combination and surprise me again.
This customer has actually decided to give me more work, just based on the designs he saw, and the design he chose was nothing like what he had thought he wanted.
it takes a real designer to pull that off.
On top of all this, this customer needs the following:
HTML template with home page, inner page, and contact page AND a matching WP theme for the associated blog.
Aakshey took all this in stride, and worked up an estimate that I believe is very fair, and this includes as many modifications as I need to satisfy my customer. Needless to say I pass along a handling fee to my customer, this is business.
We are going ahead, and I will return with a review of the site and WP theme after the work is done.
Let me say something here. I have gone from making almost nothing a month to finally getting out of a very deep hole. At first, I did everything myself.
As success comes on though, you simply cannot do the grunt work, or rather there are other things you can manage that will reward the sum of your knowledge as opposed to the sum of your labor. When you can make more money managing things than constructing them, you have make a decision.
Either you put in more hours until you cannot do more and your company stops growing, or you outsource/employ someone to do the work.
But when the money starts to come in and you can afford to outsource you run into a real problem you don't really expect:
There are a lot of service providers out there. Many are not competent, not reliable, not affordable, nor professional.
Affordable, competent, reliable professionals are
very hard to find.
Aakshey is one.