Is Webdesign Biz Rich?

Please just want to ask, is web design business profitable for a student?

Where can you refer me to for a qaulity webdesign training programe in Port-Harcourt?

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.

of course being a web designer is very lucrative if you know what you are doing and getting the right skills is also important, these days web designers get new skills using what you call web templates there are easy to use and requires little or no attention from anyone just slide the CD of the software and prompto you're ON you can get the best of webtemplates by visiting sites like www.hostandstores.com
i'm sure there would be of help.
cheers

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

MAY I ASK U DIS QUESTION. IS DA WEB DESIGN BUSINESS PROFITABLE 4 MEMBERS?

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

Web design business is one business that is receiving a great attention in Nigeria these days because most people are beginning to see the importance of an online presence for their business.

There are still a lot of organisations that are not yet online. So if you have what it takes to impress them, they could hire you.

studentetc:

Fellow Nairalanders,

I have just registered the domain name www.studentetc.com Any bright ideas or suggestions on what site the domain could be used for.

Thanks.

like the name - anything to do with student u can even use it to link up students in all university in ur 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

Yes, very profitable, I don't know of how saturated the U.S market is, but I have a friend there who makes about $50,000 monthly from web-designing.

800 million people are online today and only about 50 million websites (not including, sub-domains). Over 200 million people out of those 800 million need a website. Over 70% of the current 50 million websites need the strategic counsel ans services of a web designer.

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 ?

It is lucrative if you know what you are about, and do your job well.

You need to always be ahead my learning new design techniques and technologies.

I would not consider folks who customize ready-made templates as designers since anyone with a good computer skills can do that.

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,

Templates are good if only you know how to use them.
Of course you cant edit a sophisticated template if you are not a great web designer yourself.

Therefore, I will advise that you develop your web design skill to the uttermost before
you consider using a template.

i'm a web designer and I use templates once in a while in other to beat client's deadline. However, I do develop as much qualitative templates as the once being sold if the client is not in a hurry. Samples of templates I developed my self: www.rolatirade.com  www.astrosoccer.com

IT is, and would always be.

There is no point to re-invent the wheel. If you have a job that a client will pay $500-$800, I prefer to spend $100 on a nice template+customization to suit the client, than spending precious time on designing template. that's the only way to meet deadline,in a highly competitive market. Like someone said, you need to kow what you're doing otherwise u will mess things up.

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

@Zogo, dont even thin about it, web presence providing sucks, and you might regret coming into it, dont mind all those post above mine, they wont tell you the truth, see, yould get so frustrated that if you have no other income source, you might consider sucide, but if you manage to scale through like a few of ** then you just might be smiling to the banks very regularly,

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 ur 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 ur haters ur 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!!

Somtimes i get to wonder what someppl think about money making, goosh!! a brother wants to know if he'ld make it in web, and you are giving him advertising advices, do you know how expensive these things are? the best he can do as regards that is to get a snippet ad on dailies and the dont always do too much, with respect to the fact that he is even just starting,

My advice is that you start with freelancing for a while, get better and then blow big, You must start to crawl before you run, else yould fall. No matter how much ad's you make, or support you get,

Rotimi:
The best part of ur post

My advice is that you start with freelancing for a while, get better and then blow big, You must start to crawl before you run, else yould fall. No matter how much ad's you make, or support you get,

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.

Practice what you preach, "don't speak for him either"

and please please please don't call me by my first name, i don't feel it

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).

, *i'll pass*