The Shoemaker’s Son Has No Shoes
Have you ever heard of the famous saying, “the shoe maker’s son has no shoes?” This saying generally means that the cobbler spends so much time repairing the shoes of his customers that he doesn’t have the time to repair his childrens’ shoes. The saying can also be applied to domain developers and designers who have outdated and/or ugly websites.
How can web designers expect to get new customers when their own websites look so horrible and uncreative? With my favorite web designer booked up for a while, I’ve been looking for someone who can fill in just in case I have a project come up (like a creative mini site header for MountainBikers.com as an example if it doesn’t sell for $6,300). I’ve been searching for links on 99Designs, eLance and even Craigslist, and a number of designers’ sites I’ve come across are just bad.
When marketing your services, you need to market yourself first. If you have a crappy website, some people might expect your work to be crappy too. I guess the same goes for domain blogs. If you have crappy domain names, people probably expect your advice to be crappy too 🙂 LOL
If you happen to know of a good designer looking for a couple small future projects, let me know. I don’t have something right now, but I am always asked about great designers and I am always happy to add someone to my rolodex!
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About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has sold seven figures worth of domain names in the last five years. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest.Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Google + | Facebook | Email
Reece Berg
Completely agree.
If a web designer doesn’t have the time or skill to design something nice for their own website, I really question how much effort they would put in for their customers.
As for domain names and credibility — I’ll click “generic.com” at least 8 times out of 10 (usually a couple clicks going to Wikipedia) if it comes up on the first page search results for what I’m searching for and often it is the best or very near the best source.
Mark
Hi Elliot:
Just curious but can you provide a rate range that we should expect to pay a website designer? For instance $50 per hour? $75 per hour? And how many hours should we expect to pay for if we are looking for a 5 page website?
Any input would be appreciated by you or your readers.
Happy Friday,
Mark
Elliot
@Mark
It really varies depending on the skill level, location, experience, project…etc. I’m not the best person to answer this.