How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business: With Companion CD - ROM [Paperback]

Charlotte Evans (Author), Bruce C Brown (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 20, 2008

According to a 2007 survey by Netcraft, there are more than 108 million Web sites worldwide. Every Web site needs to be designed. The Pricing & Ethical Guidelines Handbook published by the Graphic Arts Guild reports that the average cost of designing a Web site for a small corporation can range from $7,750 to $15,000. It is incredibly easy to see the enormous profit potential. Web design businesses can be run part- or full-time and can easily be started in your own home. As such, they are one of the fastest growing segments of the Internet economy. This book will teach you all you need to know about getting your own Web site design business started in the minimum amount of time. Here is the manual you need to cash in on this highly profitable segment of the industry. This book is a comprehensive and detailed study of the business side of Web site design. It should be studied by anyone investigating the opportunities of opening a Web design business and will arm you with everything you need, including sample business forms, contracts, worksheets and checklists for planning, opening, and running day-to-day operations, plans and layouts, and dozens of other valuable, time-saving tools that no entrepreneur should be without. While providing detailed instructions and examples, the author leads you through finding a location that will bring success, drawing up a winning business plan (the Companion CD-ROM has the actual business plan that can be used in MS Word), buying (and selling) a Web design store, pricing formulas, sales planning, tracking competitors, bookkeeping, media planning, pricing, copy writing, hiring and firing employees, motivating workers, managing and training employees, accounting procedures, successful budgeting, and profit planning development. By reading this book, you will become knowledgeable about basic cost control systems, retail math and pricing issues, Web site plans and diagrams, software and equipment layout and planning, legal concerns, sales and marketing techniques, IRS reporting requirements, customer service, direct sales, monthly profit and loss statements, tax preparation, public relations, general management skills, low and no cost ways to satisfy customers and build sales, and low cost internal marketing ideas, as well as thousands of great tips and useful guidelines. The manual delivers literally hundreds of innovative ways to streamline your business. Learn new ways to make your operation run smoother and increase performance. Shut down waste, reduce costs, and increase profits. Business owners will appreciate this valuable resource and reference it in their daily activities as a source for ready-to-use forms, Web sites, operating and cost cutting ideas, and mathematical formulas that can be easily applied. The Companion CD-ROM contains all the forms in the book, as well as a sample business plan you can adapt for your own use.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Atlantic Publishing Company (April 20, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1601381433
• ISBN-13: 978-1601381439
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #235,331 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Really helped me with HOW TO RUN my business, October 9, 2009

By 

Rocky Boxboa "Rocky Boxboa" (Philly, PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business: With Companion CD - ROM (Paperback)

The title of this book is How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business, but it contains so much more that can apply to any entrepreneur starting a new business. The first thing you want to know is this book will not teach you how to design websites, the book assumes that you are already good at that. This book tells you how to turn that skill into a viable business.

My favorite part of the book is the add-on services section. It makes perfect sense, you already have the skill and know-how to create great web sites, you have a list of businesses that trust (and more importantly pay) you for that service, so why not expand your business with complementary services like search engine optimization and pay-per-click marketing programs. You can tell that the authors of this book have already gone through the difficulties of starting and operating a web site design business. They have already had success and the failures in the business and they give the reader a roadmap to the success while avoiding the failures. It is like getting the answer to the test! This is one of those books that you will find yourself pulling off your shelf from time to time as you grow your business.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Welcome Pleasure!, December 16, 2009

By 

K. Van Veen (Pacific NW) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business: With Companion CD - ROM (Paperback)

Simply - I thoroughly enjoyed this book. The content is well organized in a progression of information that makes sense when starting any business. There are relative and applicable links or references at the end of each chapter as well as questions to ask yourself before moving onto the next step in your business.

This book will help me greatly in my own endeavors to start a web design business. I recommend it highly!

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poor Quality Book All Around, January 16, 2010

By 

Riley N. "Riley N." (chicago, il) - See all my reviews

This review is from: How to Open & Operate a Financially Successful Web Site Design Business: With Companion CD - ROM (Paperback)

I was extremely disappointed with this book. It is almost 400 pages and most of it is what I can best describe as "annoying fluff" that provides vague suggestions that provide no real value to the reader. Here is an example of a paragraph in the book:

P.210 "The success of your marketing is also going to depend, in part, on how well you deal with people who follow up on your ads. There is no point in creating and paying for good advertisements only to fall short in the follow up process. You can present whatever information you want about your business, but if you do not have good follow-up, your marketing efforts will be wasted."

The author constantly repeats themselves throughout the book across chapters and in the above case, within the same paragraph. The above paragraph could have been widdled down to 1 sentence or bullet point. It feels as though the author is babbling to make the book as long as possible (like I used to do in college to reach the minimum page requirement for my essays). The book was written by two different people and it feels very in-cohesive, as if they just divided up topics and started writing with poor organization. I doubt the author(s) has any special skill or training in teaching.

The book wanders off for chapters talking about general business topics that are not specific to web design businesses. For example, there are pages and pages about how to conduct yourself in an interview. The author is suggesting you are interviewing with your clients when it is actually more similar to a sales presentation. There is a paragraph just about the perfect handshake and the author stresses that it could be the key to whether you get your client or not. Pretty ridiculous to me.

Overall, the book provides some relevant information but not a lot of specific calls to action about web design-specific topics. Neither of the authors even have a web site of their own to show for. I don't think they are qualified to write a how-to book on web design. I have a little background in business and web design and this book was 90% useless. For some reason I decided I had to read some sort of how-to book to make myself feel prepared before I went on my own. This book was very painful to read and made me feel stupid for wasting my time on it. People who are really directionless and lost might find this book more useful, but it is probably a waste of money for people who are already savvy and don't need to be babied about the obvious. This book is ridiculously overpriced and wasn't even edited (several grammatical errors) and the printing and binding is even lopsided! This is an amateur book in all respects.