I have several competitors for the “web design columbia mo” search category on Google.

• YourFriendonTheWeb has  10,550 links to its site to stay on top.
• Studio 7 has 3,580

How many do I need to stay on the front page?

• 27

Why is that?

It’s called quality content that the user is interested in.

http://HigherEdWebDesign.com/

Make me an offer I can’t refuse.

CoMoWebDesign.com is available for rent to anyone wanting a killer domain with some good SEO potential.

Make me an offer via the contact page.

Teaching something really shows you how little you’ve thought about things. It reveals all the design habits you rely on by forcing you to explain them… and sometimes they’re just that: a habit rather than a logical practice.

The hardest thing to explain for me has been the concept that design theory only gets you so far. After that, you must work hard. But work hard at what? You can’t break a sweat at design (unless your office is over 90 degrees inside, which has happened to me repeatedly). You can’t flex your muscles and push harder.

So what does it mean to work hard at design?

I think it is this: You must be a scientist. We have culturally learned to think about science in the wrong way — the lone genius working late at night in his lab… has a lightbulb idea. That’s simply not true. Science is about having a question and working vigorously to answer that question in the lab by repeatedly experimenting.

Design is much the same. Good designers will test dozens or hundreds of hypotheses in a design.

Here’s a great time lapse video that illustrates what I’m talking about:

Notice the dozens of tests that go on while this designer works, not just diligently, but obsessively testing one idea, destroying it for another. When he tires of testing hypotheses on one page, he switches to run tests another page

Too often I find the students staring at the screen waiting for their design education to inform their next move, waiting for the eternal words of a teacher to solve the problem.

That’s dishonest. Here’s why:

It is my experience that setting up a wordpress website and quality theme with

• proper hosting and domain services
• reasonable customization of a theme and graphics
• SEO considerations met
• training for the client
• content insertion (assuming that it’s ready to go)

takes about 20-ish hours to do it right.

Let’s do some math

Now, if I divide $400 by 20 hours, I come to $20/hr. That’s not a bad hourly wage… until I take out taxes and one’s own expenses.

• Take 20% for federal taxes and you’re left with $320.
• Minus 2.5 days at of decent hosting ($1.66/day) and I’m at $315.
• I assume they need to pay an electric bill. Mine averages about $17 for 2.5 work days, leaving us with $298.
• Let’s assume they bought you a decent theme for $30, taking us to$268
• Presumably they’re upgrading software and hardware every 2 years (means about $3.50/day) = $8.75
• Taking us to about $260 profit.
• Leaving us at $13.00/hr wages.
• (I won’t even bring up the idea of insurance, health care, and book keeping expenses).

I don’t seriously think that these $400 websites have 20 solid hours of labor put into them, do you?

I think one of two things are happening here:

• The $400 website has the bare minimum of effort put in or
• it’s being outsourced overseas.

So, how does the $400 website sound now?

It’s a reflection of my goal of becoming free of debt as an insulator from what goes on around me in the world of economics.

Naturally I don’t cheer when markets are troubled, but I don’t wish to share in its anxieties.

It doesn’t mean that I bury my head in the sand — I pay very close attention to the world economy and geopolitics;, it’s simply that I want my personal economy to be separated from its ups and downs.

An effective solution is derived from working and working and working over and over again. Experiment, fail, win, experiment, start over. Work work work.

Your design education gives you a framework for working, but doesn’t give you the solution.

I know people who perpetually live in that state of frantic – never enough time – overworked state. The funny thing is, they’re in that state when there is a huge logjam of work or when there is only a trickle.

Discipline vs Ethic

The difference is in approach to work discipline. This is different from work ethic; the frantic people are often working much harder than I am, but not accomplishing more. I think the difference is in the ability to do more than prioritize.

More than Priorities

If you’re like me, you keep a to-do list on paper or in a more sweeping system like Basecamp. The list is prioritized in some way or reminders are set for dates and times. Yet there are those little projects we know need to be done, but they don’t get done. They sit on our desk or stay at the bottom of the list for weeks until that frantic nightmare scenario comes: It’s due right now (and the necessary information to finish isn’t available)!

Here’s how I avoid those frantic nightmares:

Block Scheduling

• Monday through Tuesday are my days for dealing with random tasks and paperwork.
• Approve time
• Look at schedule
• Read those articles that flew by on the weekend (starred in Google Reader)
• Deal with receipts or invoices
• Send emails I wrote the week before but saved as drafts
• Print posters signs and banners that are coming due
• Have meetings
• Wednesday through Friday are my days for web design and problem solving.
• Design some new thing
• Dig in to the analytics of a page or site
• Clean up something that’s been bugging me
• Re-imagine something
• Do the job of my job description

So, for random paperwork tasks, I schedule a to-do reminder on Monday-Tuesday. Once those are out of the way, I really don’t need much of a reminder to do the more interesting design and coding projects before me; that’s my default state anyway. The challenge is breaking from that default.

I don’t use this pattern perfectly, and it can be especially challenging when staff need attention or have questions during that Wednesday through Thursday work period; but when something interrupts or changes what I want to do, it simply gets dealt with on the spot.

Try block scheduling for a couple of weeks and see if it gets you closer to your goals.