Is The Web Design Business Lucrative?

Zogo,

With a good marketing strategy and good customer service, any business is lucrative.  In the web dev arena, working on sites and having a site where you showcase your work also helps.

In my opinion, web dev is at the stage in naija now, that it was in the US in the 90s.  Now is the time to hop on.  Once the market gets saturated with sites, the biz will stagnate and pick up slowly, as people conclude that even though the backend works, they need to improve the user experience in order to make addicts out of customers

As far as training, I will defer this issue to someone who actually lives in PH, although I will say this:  If you want to take this biz seriously and the only places in naija to learn this stuff r in sokoto, then u should be willing to relocate there for a while

I hope this helps.

There is notting like you doing your stuff from scrash that makes you a prefessional webmaster.

The most important skills in the business is sales and marketing of the web as a tool for business, yourself and your skills in that order.

To be successful as a business you need to generate the right revenues based on your initial plans. I am assuming you have the skills or know where to get them from - there is no shortage of good web developers. Generating the required volume of business is where the problem lies for people starting out.

Regards

Tim
http://www.darwin.com.ng
http://www.ip4properties.com
http://www.ip4hotels.com
http://www.purefoto.com

like the name - anything to do with student u can even use it to link up students in all university in your location- lagos nigeria, usa, uk everywhere basically every school has a forum

anmd provide information about student related things n news, travel discounts, parties and every other thing

I will be on the fence here as i will be speaking from experience,


Works and designs can only tells, Web Designs is lucrative even more profitable as every small entreprenuership is yet to get a web site on there own and on the other hand,its not that profittable becos Millions of Designers are develop everyday mostly in lagos and they will never want to get humuliated for each other, So in such case its good to only have the web designing fundermental for self use only, If you dont know anyone you cant get a job to do not even designing a page


I think am communicating here, arent I ?

Someone got a point here, Really some folks call themselves a Web Designer and they still use ready-made templates which supposes not to be so,

IT is, and would always be.

Panache:

Though what u r saying is true, to the trained eye, a template can be spotted from half a mile away.  Personally, if I c a templated site (especially those from out of the box software like FP et al), I am turned off immediately.  I will usually give them benefit of doubt by viewing the source.  Moreover, such templates tend to add bloated, and often unnecessary code.  On the other hand, if you were to develop a site from scratch and use that code as a template for others, there will be a noticeable difference.  What I am saying is similar to using MS word clip art, as opposed to spending money on higher grade art on a CD, as opposed again to paying a designer to come up with something that is very professional.

Remember, and this may depend on where u r, a company like IBM is willing to spend thousands on their site.  Believe me, they will not pay you that much to put a bunch of cookie-cutter html/graphics templates on their site, thus possibly ruining their reputation and damaging their brand, which is all a serious company has.  I personally get turned off by Nigerian-based sites that have a bunch of photos of white pple or pple who though black, aren't Nigerian at all.

As always, my 2 cents

Business is in itself a risk.  Some win and others lose.  Just cos it didnt work for u doesn't mean it won't work for someone else and vice-versa.

Any good biz, in my opinion is hard work.  u will probably put in more hours than if you worked for someone else.  Benefits may be unnoticeable.  Again, u hv to weigh the benefits vs the disadvantages.

having said that, from personal experience, any biz should do well with a good marketing strategy.  So for example, I had once put up a post here about web workshop (it is still on, I am just trying to sort out a few things in terms of vacation time et al ).  However, I am 1000% sure that if I advertised on TV, radio, top newspapers, etc, the response would be thru the roof.  Sure, it costs money, but many atimes, it takes u spending money to make money.

Another thing that could drive biz your way has to do with benefits you provide the client(s).  Another example of mine:  when i was there, i owned a kiosk.  Pple said I could never compete with the big boys (advice: make your haters your motivators) but I not only competed, i beat them:  back in the early 90s, I did stuff that was done in the US even though I was never in the US as an adult or read that many books about the place (I wasn't fortunate to be born during the internet era): I would tell customers that if they bought 5 bottles of coke, I would throw in another one for free.  Naysayers said it was suicidal, but what happened?  Pple flocked to me in droves and within a yr, my kiosk expanded from a roadside venture to me actually acquiring a building.  The kicker was that some of the same naysayers would come behind the others backs and ask to contribute money to my biz, which my honest self would pay them back weekly in the form of dividends.

Not to mince words, every biz has a chance to be lucrative or a woeful failure.  You just have to say to yourself, no matter what, you will succeed.

here's to success to us all!!

Rotimi:
The best part of your post

The others? Highly subjective in my opinion.  Advice is to be taken, not accepted as rule of law.  If he doesn't have the resources to advertise (and I don't think he has addressed this thus far, so don't speak for him/her), let him say so himself.

Again, don't speak for others where they can speak for themselves.

Rotimi 

I did.  I suggest u take English lessons.  Okay, this is getting "boring" now.  Don't clutter NL with such posts. As u know me by now, I won't tire.

(Now let's see if he will actually respond to this post, hmmmm).