I have been self-employed since around 92, I have more failed startups under my belt than some you have had sex. My current business is 13 years old but it still makes me just a living,
I grew it from me and one bloke to 13 employees. Now here is the thing, when I had all those employees I earned less than I did when it was just 2 of us.
I didn’t get to do much except sales, admin and fixing stuff those 13 Guys fucked up. After doing some sums I let attrition do the job and reduced back to a solo outfit.
Now I am tired before I start my day, my back hurts and lifting stuff that just two years ago was a breeze is no longer as easy. This is an age thing, I realised the other day that my pension plan is good for just about 3 hours. https://dustfactory.co.za You can look at my website here and until about 3 years ago it was supplying too many leads for me to reply to. COVID broke that., but I am tired more than not getting enough work. .
I ran a web dev company before this one in a small town in Africa and clients were limited, too much competition, people offering work at stupid low prices and I got tired of counting cents, so I went back to my trade.
I used my skills developed during that period to out perform all my opposition on the web for the woodworking business. The most important thing that I learned in the business was saying no, or even fuck off. You cannot offer value and quality if you are too cheap.
I have moved to a big city, reduced overheads and can now retire about 3 hours before I kick the bucket. I really don’t want to get back in the death spiral competing with people charging too little for their service, mainly because I am convinced that a website that doesn’t bring results is not an investment for any business.
I have started updating my skills again, updating the CMS that I built and have been using. also have registered a few domains to build sites on as test beds.
The numbers below are based on exchange rates and are in no way accurate, they are just an example. My question is as follows, let’s say the cheap blokes are selling web sites for $100 and they place them, charge for hosting about $7 a month, but are doing no SEO, no forward planning, just put it up and forget it, How much should I be charging a month for full service?
Would you be willing to pay $250 a month for a site that includes all the SEO stuff like semantics, includes me sorting out your local SEO stuff, creating content regularly or would that seem like too much of a difference. I am assuming small businesses as clients.
Next check out my website and tell me if it creates confidence. Note not all the content is complete yet, but check out these pages please.
https://centuriondesign.co.za/
https://centuriondesign.co.za/pages/SEO.html
https://centuriondesign.co.za/pages/web-design.html
Tell me how I could improve them, What could I do that would help you make a decision?
Honestly, and I say this respectfully, I think it’s a little too late to the game… your sites use outdated formats and code. Nowadays it’s all about frameworks like Laravel, codeignitor, vue.js, etc with dynamic view frameworks like bootstrap
The navigation is completely outdated as well and doesn’t float down with the page as you scroll like typical sites do now. I would look into bootstrap websites and see how they look, as an example of where things are now
It’s also Mobile First, Desktop Second nowadays. Your websites are heavily Desktop First
The .html extension shows another layer of older technology. Nowadays it’s .php and you never show that at the end (using .htaccess to remove the extension)
When you click the links at the top, it’s using some kinda iframe / accordian switch and doesn’t give the user much confirmation that the page changed other than having to check and see… Bad practice. If you’re not going to visually/completely reload the page on click, then it should all be on one page and at most take you down to the different content, or have page titles at the top of each page so they know what page it’s on. OR highlight the page in the navigation links. Switching dynamically without much visual cue like it is now, is bad practice unfortunately. Either reload the whole website, or show something more uniform to signify the change (like highlighting in navbar, or having page titles)
I see you have another website, woodguy.co.za? That site is actually updated. Looks like maybe a Shopify site or something, but that’s the type of look at a minimum that you should go for (especially on a phone device)
Past this I don’t think anyone is going to pay a monthly subscription like that for SEO when people sell SEO for a onetime flat fee of usually dirt cheap (whether it works or not). Also, SEO is only half of the battle nowadays. Gone are the days where you’d rank high with the right keywords… It’s more than that like engagement/clicks, and even payments to Google ads or whomever you want to be high on
I’m sorry I just wanted to be honest about this
There is money to be made in buying and selling domain names though, unfortunately that’s also out the window as most places snatch and hold for over $1,500+ that people just aren’t gonna pay…
As for your current business, they always say that you need $350,000 in revenue before hiring another “head”. If you don’t, you’re at risk majorly… You likely got too many heads and spread yourself too thin. It happens to the best of us unfortunately.
Don’t be discouraged though. Coding/websites just evolve very fast/quick. My recommendation would be to do what I did… Get rid of the “spaghetti code” and switch to Laravel, and use Bootstrap themes to start out with. Obviously it’ll take a lot of learning but YouTube is at your disposal. I converted all of my sites from situations like yours to Laravel and Bootstrap and never looked back. It keeps things structured, easy to update/change, and more. You probably think it’s eays now… I did too… Until you start learning and figuring out that dang, there’s a much better (mostly structured/standardized) way to do these things
Best of luck to you :)