Hi Devon! I’ve got some more stuff to talk through with you.I’ve been thinking a lot about freelancing and I’ve made a lot of progress around the kinds of things I want to offer people.
- My natural clients to start with will be restaurant owners, lawyers (I’ve worked in both those industries) and other small business owners.
- In every restaurant I’ve worked in, changing the website has been a big deal, usually requiring paying “the website guy,” even for simple changes. Some restaurants actually can’t access their own websites; they have to go through the web guy.
- I’m super curious as to why this is. On the surface, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me: even if the web guy is restricting access to keep the restaurant owner from breaking things, if everything is on Github breaking something shouldn’t be a problem. And with a continuous deployment setup I definitely don’t see a problem: roll it back to previous commit and redeploy, should take like 5-10 minutes depending on build time. You could have an agreement that any changes are only made during business hours, and/or charge huge fees to revert to an earlier version when it’s after hours.
- If this is a standard business arrangement, then I would like to offer business owners a way to have a website that they can control. I feel like I could offer them different levels of control: control over the whole damn site, control over the whole site after they check in with me about what they want to do, control over stuff that’s easy to change in a CMS like text and photos, or I can just handle everything for people who don’t want to deal with it.
- This would jibe with where the industry seems headed anyway: Webflow looks like the real deal. Apparently 26 Y Combinator companies use it. I haven’t gotten into their tutorials or CMS yet, but their 5-minute tutorial is pretty impressive.
So, for our call, I’d like to talk through business stuff:
- I’m thinking about offering clients different levels of control over their site, from full control to no control, and building the site in either Webflow or Gatsby based on what they need. I could focus on those two and keep looking at MERN etc in my own side projects.
- Is this a marketable idea, to give people control over their own websites?
- Does this kind of flexibility make sense? It seems like I could pretty quickly get a decent amount of expertise with Webflow and Gatsby, which together would cover most small business needs. Is that correct?
- It’s starting to look like the actual programming skills needed to put together a small business website are not super hard, and that success would be more determined by my design skills, strategic design and marketing skills (how well the websites reach their target audiences and drive business), and the way I market my own business. Is that right?
- What should I be looking at long term if I go this route? It’s looking like if I do this, then short-term the thing to do is to focus on being able to build simple websites quickly for small businesses, and if I can get good at that then I’d have a reasonable market to work with. If I go that route, what kinds of things should I be thinking about long term? It feels to me that this route might get me up to speed fastest but also have the potential to limit my long-term options.
I’m off this whole week and it would be great to get a call set up. Let me know if you’ve got some availability. Thanks as always!
Todo
- Resources for analytics
- Send link to Gatsby AB testing doc: https://www.gatsbyjs.com/docs/ab-testing/