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I have learned an awful lot in the past two years of working for myself. The most important lesson I think I can share with you, concerns pricing.

Of course for anyone starting out in web design, or any other form of design, you do work for free for a certain period of time, in order to build up your portfolio. This gives you great experience in client management, and you learn more too about your trade as you go along.

Once you have let’s say 5 web sites under your belt, you NEED to change. You have to give yourself credit for doing an excellent job, for having learned an awful lot, and now, it’s time for your clients to pay.

Believe me, there is no other area of work in the world, where they give you freebies. If someone is buying a car, they don’t ask the car dealer for a free car in exchange for nothing do they? They also don’t ask for a free car under the premise that, ‘if you give me a free car, I’ll tell my friends how great you were, and you might make a real sale out of it in the future’.

So why should we be expected to work for free.. or even, work for less. Yes, yes, there’s a recession. We know. But don’t you want the few good web designers that exist to still be here this time next year? If you do, you have to pay us, otherwise enjoy dealing with cowboys for the next 20 years after the ‘real’ web designers have been squeezed out of the trade. And believe me, those cowboys will charge you a LOT more than the quality designers out there today, and give you less, a lot less, a brick that cannot, and will not perform in most cases. None of us want the cowboys to win, believe me..so if you are thinking of hiring a web designer, take the quality of their work into account before you start to haggle them out of existence!

Anyway, the video below sums up this behavior prevalent in certain professions quite eloquently ;)

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