Entrepreneur

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that a lot of these actual developers that are thankfully take the time to respond to your post. Has never seen the side of the development and market industry that you're probably part of. Front end sales? Up sales? Biz up coaching? That's your thing? Message me I can help. I can legitimately help and I'm going to at least have conversation with you

Lay off the web design and focus on photography or smaller wood working offerings.

Make a mobile-first 1-page multi-section website with something like WordPress or wix because users know how to navigate those types of sites - and it's all about the user experience, not your ability to code.

Market yourself at wedding events. Build relationships with local schools and churches for their yearbooks and directories. Promote birthday photos at daycare and after-school places. Heck, even offer pet photography.

The point is to find a niche where your services can shine, instead of drowning in competition in the quickly changing market of web design and AI-driven SEO/content.

Or... Maybe the heavy lifting you used to do in woodworking could be mitigated by using your woodworking skills in a smaller form. Folk where I'm at are making a killing sanding down found wood into table tops or benches and filling the natural cracks with colored resin.

Cabinet Doors are also a big market, customers don't have to tear out and replace the entire cabinet, instead they get new cabinet doors which are much more affordable for them - whether it's painted, resin, wood-burned designs, added wooden embellishments, etc. You could even offer modular options to fit on standard IKEA bookshelves and cabinets so folk can customize their furniture and you can keep your costs down due to its modular nature.

I have a feeling ur strengths are in selling. Let one of us redo ur site for you. Id be willing to do it free of charge. I'll just be interested in a tiny stake in ur business. I can be your registered agent in the US, and I bring a lot of small business development and e-commerce development marketing experience to the table. I do web development, SEO marketing all that stuff too. But MY THING ultimately turned out to be SMB development training cells and support staff, and coming up with creative fulfillment solutions. Let me know if that piquee ur interest. I have years of experience data mining for specific lead sources, traditional lead funneling through marketing, and I'm an expert at merchant arbitration. In fact, I became known for - if a client called in to cancel services for any reason, I would turn them around and upsell them to a package involving more investment on their part. lol.

You are delusional if you aren't seeing how bad the "design" is. It is clearly not mobile friendly either, I'm not sure where you tested the site. Open developer tools on google chrome (surely you know this exists if you design and code sites?), then use even just available presets to test on different devices...

Here's some advice if you plan on making websites, go on udemy, find colt steele and do the latest web dev bootcamp. It's dirt cheap and you'll learn how modern web development works. Find a course on design too or just simply look at websites around???? Whilst you are at it, find a course on modern SEO practices.

To be honest, if I were you, I'd concentrate on your actual skills in wood working and start a business centered around it. Hire others to do the lifting and you quality check and lead. You are not made for web development or design. Frankly, I'm not sure how you ran a business around it at all with your "skills".

I'm not surprised you have a huge number of start-ups under your belt by the way. That's not the badge of honor you think it is.

Lastly, your post is insulting. Like other people, I can't decide if this is some kind of a joke? If you did the bare minimum of research, you wouldn't be here asking stupid questions with obvious answers because you'd be busy improving what you know and putting out actual value. Check your arrogance because you have nothing to support it expect your own delusions.

You should pick the thing you’re best and just focus on becoming brilliant at that one thing.

Once you are really an expert in one in demand skill, charging a $100ph for remote freelance work is quite possible these days.

I don’t know what you guys are talking about. His website works just fine on mobile. It just looks like shit and seems lazy.

Here’s one thing you can take a look at.

“The second option costs R 1200.00 and then I supply a set of plans for the kitchen and multiple views and 3 different colour combinations. Should you accept my quote, the R 1200 will be deducted from the overall investment. The reason for this is that I can spend up to 6 hours designing and planning and most often don't get as much as a thank you. “

Why can’t you just do something like Product - Price Product 2 - Price 2 So and so forth

You don’t have to justify why you’re charging people certain amounts. Just tell people what you offer and what it costs.

I'm US based and paid $110/mo to a company in Canada for SEO that was incredibly effective. Hosting was $25/mo to a US based co. Site uptime was 100% over 6 years.

There are some skilled web devs who gave you honest reviews and their skills for free. Listen to them. From user perspective and me as a business owner, sites look like it was made by my 11 year old cousin and I couldn't force myself to read anything there. Plus of course looks terrible on android.

Reading your replies I appreciate that you're willing to engage in honest self-assessment and are processing criticism fairly well.

I'm also a 25+ year web developer and have run agencies. I hope this is helpful, please forgive the bluntness.

Update your skills. As others have suggested and your replies indicate you're aware, the design sensibility of the websites you're showing us is stale – decades out of date – and too far out of touch with modern professional standards to say nothing of client or visitor expectations.

You seem to have an old-school appreciation for web standards and wariness of prioritizing aesthetics over content, but much of what you've written here and in your marketing copy reveals a cognitive bias that you critically undervalue design. This is holding you back.

Browse modern and award-winning website design until you understand in your bones how what you're showing us today falls short, and then upskill your front-end capabilities to meet modern standards. You know your tags, now make really learning HTML5, CSS3, and modern Javascript a priority.

Keep the rest of your technology stack if you like. Clients and users don't care or even know if you're using PHP or the latest JS framework. WordPress shade doesn't belong in marketing copy. Small and medium business owners won't understand what you're talking about. But they've heard "WordPress", and if you can sell them one with excellent Core Web Vitals maybe just swallow your pride for starters since you need to build a book.

Stick to your principles that content strategy should inform design and not the other way around, but don't neglect modern aesthetics and conventions of usability. You have some catching up to do to produce work that doesn't just rank, but attracts, engages, and delights clients and users.

Rename the company. Including "Design" and "Photography" limits your brand positioning and skews perception of your service offerings. Keep your brand as flexible and adaptable as possible, and then optimize for SEO on individual service pages.

Rewrite your story. Remove references to "1996", "14400k modems", and the excitement of discovering HTML. This framing doesn't convey expertise through experience so much as a feeling of being stuck in the past. I say this as someone who was there too. I can tell from reading your writing that you understand you're selling your clients on increasing their business. Just keep in mind that's an aspirational vision of their story in which you're just a supporting character. You're an okay writer, but trim the fat. Yes you're trying to rank, but you also need to convert when they land and these walls of text are nonstarters. Cut your text in half, for starters.

Lose the 27 year old screenshots. Those are some big name clients, just show their logos instead.

Render real text, not headings as images.

Gotta go. Good luck.

Why are you asking for help?. If you a certificate in SEO?

buddy what are you doing. I don't think this is the right business for you. I'm not a dev and even i can flat out say I'm not taking any web designing services from you looking at your site.

You do know you have to show that you're good in what you're trying to sell?

Not a web designer more of a general front end dev and marketing guy but when this many people say you have a design/ usability problem it’s probably true. Most people function at about a 6th grade level it needs to be idiot proof.

Tell you your company is called Centurion right? Let me buy it and you can move on to something else.

You need to go back to a job. You're burnt out

You can go on behance and find an affordable website designer who is a professional, one thing you need is social proof so don’t forget to add that

I'm going to start by saying you must be a great carpenter!

There's lots of criticism here in this thread, but you should have known that it could go either way when you asked for feedback.

The fact that you learned how to code, built a website for your carpentry business, and it's generated leads over the past 10 years is very impressive!

You want to sell websites that focus on outcomes and prioritise function over form. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. That's the way to go in fact. The problem is that you don't exist in a vacuum. All over the world, small businesses are already getting websites that deliver outcomes and look good.

Let's look at outcomes first. Most small businesses are local, providing physical/in-person services within a geographical vicinity. This makes marketing a website much easier as your competition is limited to that geographic boundary. For example, a plumber will service customers within a 50km radius from his business. A doctor will service people that are willing to come to his location, usually not more than 50km away, for example. Similarly, a kitchen carpenter might service customers within a 100km radius from their location.

Because competition is restricted to a very small geographical area, it's not very hard to get a website to rank in local searches. Ranking for "kitchen cabinets" is hard, ranking for "kitchen cabinets Johannesburg" is easier, ranking for "kitchen cabinets Bela-Bela" is much, much easier.

It's not surprising that your dustfactory website was ranking well given that you said you're in a smaller town. Even if you weren't focusing on local SEO, Google knows where you're located and it knows where the searchers are located so it delivers locally relevant results. I'm not trying to be a dick, but the results you had are more likely to do with how good Google is at their job rather than how good you are at SEO.

If you target customers with small, local, service based businesses you could deliver similar outcomes for them. But before you can sell someone on outcomes, you need to make a good first impression (design) or they won't enquire.

Now let's talk about 'looking good'. There's no accounting for taste. Art is subjective. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There are plenty of clichés that explain why people have very different tastes. This already makes being objective about design difficult.

On top of that, it's human nature to be proud of things we've done. All children think their drawings are on the fridge because they're clearly works of art. The only way to get real feedback on creative work is when you're doing it for someone else. People are rarely objective and honest enough with themselves to evaluate their own creativity.

You've been designing for yourself all this time, so you're clearly happy with what you've done. Again, not to be a dick, but you've been patting yourself on the back for the last 10 years so much you've decided to make a business out of it.

The feedback you've been getting here is reflective of the market, and that will include potential customers that want a website built. You don't exist in a vacuum, those potential customers can go online and see millions of websites that look better and find web developers from all over the world for cheaper. Web design/dev is not a local service, it can be done from anywhere.

This doesn't mean you should give up, but you need to be realistic. Your Web design skills, at this point, do not come close to your competitors. You need to update yourself on where the industry is at and learn the current best practices and conventions.

While you believe it's more noble/skilled/commendable/tech savvy to build websites using your custom CMS, that's because you aren't aware of where the industry is right now. Customers don't care about your CMS, they'll only care that their beautiful logo is on an equally beautiful website.

Design is hard, it's not for everyone. You can learn web development by reading, web design has a little more to do with innate creativity and judgement.

What if instead of designing websites you focused on local SEO services? Something more technical rather than creative might suit you better.

To be honest, your site looks a bit dated. If someone visits your site and are not happy with it, they won't be confident in having you manage their website.

Some of the images are not high quality.

There's too much white space.

The sample sites you share also don't look very modern.

When I got to the bridal images, I was a little confused.

Overall, the site needs better structure, clearer images and a more modern look.

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The good news is, if you can get it to a better place, you can make MUCH more than $250 a month for everything you described above with SEO services. Much more. If you could market yourself internally, that would bring you more clients.

I hope this helps.

Why did you have to bring my sex life into this tho