Quote:
Originally posted by Nickatilynx@Apr 9 2005, 10:59 PM
LOL....ummmmmm
yeah...ummm the more I think about it....
surely a good designer can earn $1000 a week , which is your target salary ???????
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unfortunately not ;-(
there's so much competition its not worth it to try to compete ... unless you are Mike W or Sharky's AAA or Webinc, with a long list of regular clients and its really hard to compete with the mass production of webinc and the quality of the other 2 ... and even those guys have a maximum earning potental due to it being an hourly rate job that simply does not go higher than that.
A designer can't ask to be paid for a % of earnings from the site ... so its an hourly rate and the total wage you can make is restricted by how many hours in the day you can work.
Look at it this way ....
15 hours of work x $50 per hour = $750 per day or $5250 per week
MAXIMUM EARNING POTENTIAL EVER
Design of 1 paysite - 1 page, 8 hours ... 2 pages, 12 hours, 3 pages, 15 hours = $750 ....
minus time to go to the toilet, eat, see friends/family and the above paysite that could only take 1 sitting ends up taking 2 days - there's a $750 loss as you waste day 2 finishing it off.
For me, my best asset as a business owner is to be able to design my own shit as I think of it, eliminating that frustrating process of a marketer/biz owner explaining to a designer what they want.
I consider myself to be an extremely quick designer purely because of how many paysites/logos and portals i've designed in 9 years ... in 8 hours I can produce what takes most a week, because I don't have to explain to myself how I want something to look or why a certain type of bevel sucks LOL
Imagine how many more billable hours you'd have in a day if you didn't have to spend 20% of your time extracting info from a client? If you are wondering why you can't get past $X of income, look at where your billable hours go ... as you said, it all goes on answering questions and fixing *the clients* typo's etc. And every 2 minute job takes 30 minutes ... etc.
PapaG, don't underestimate the value of the skill you have - and look at how you can use it to benefit yourself. Your clients show you what they want and are effectively teaching you how they make money off your designs.
The only way to make a design worth more than the hours invested into it is to get traffic to it ... right now PapaG, you are making the design and then giving it to someone else to water and feed ...
Find one of your clients who will lend you a watering can ... another who will give you some fertilizer ... another who will share their water ... put it all together and you've started to build your own garden.
Nobody is going to give you the blueprint, because there isn't one ... we each do the same thing slightly differently ... the best advice I can give you is to open your eyes and ears and stay alert and learn - your clients are already teaching you the ropes - you just haven't noticed ;-)