thinking of starting up a website Options

[rickysaurus]

So I've been kind of wanting to start my own website up. Very simple, clients contact me for any illustrative work they want done, and I'll do it for them, at a price.

Only thing holding me back is I don't really have the confidence to do it. Do you guys think I'm qualified to actually provide my services for cash? I'm thinking of charging between 10 to 15 dollars per hour. Be honest. I don't wanna be giving my clients garbage and have unhappy customers.

[JonHMChan]

It's really what you think you mean by "qualified" and "rushing" it. When it comes to design/programming skills and capabilities, I think that the general rule is to just refuse work that you simply can't do; just don't promise that you can do a certain thing if you know you can't do it. You don't need to accept every single client - it might even help to say that you have a specialty in a certain discipline (from a business perspective, this is usually more attractive to consumers).

When it comes to pricing, to be frank, I would actually stick to the per hour charge. You'll realize that you'll want to be paid for how complex and difficult it is to do something, and that usually comes in good correlation with the amount of time you spend on a project. Trying to foresee and factor in difficulty, time spent, complications, updates and feedback, etc. - you'll find - is next to impossible. For example, I once had a client that wanted me to do a simple logo, and I charged them about a $40 flat for it (which was really just small change); but they kept telling me to do version changes that came with the time period I set. The amount of time I put into a flat rate project become disproportionate to what I earned.

If you just feel that you are "inexperienced" though, just do some research about how other people charge for services, make contacts, handle payments, etc. There are so many resources that you can find on Google that helped me that I'm sure will help you.