Misconception, not a web design company.
Well you are...
http://www.websitehandyman.co.uk/portfolio/
These are some of the sites we built and supply support for.
You provide "help and advice" to draw customers into your website and hope they call you. So yes you provide web design and hosting as part of your services.
It's our area because it's a business process like any other. Why do so many jump out of running their business and put an important side of it, Ecommerce, in the hands of web designers ?
So hang on, its a business process like any other, but why trust a web designer who has no experience of business... well surely if they are running a business "Web design business" then they are running a business and know that industry.
I went to uni, and the one thing Uni does is show you professionalism, all your work is critiqued and checked by lecturers with decades of commercial experience (well mine were at least). You have other students to gain inspiration from and then see things in different ways.
I worked for 10yrs before uni as a HGV fitter, and thought of students and uni life as a lazy way of doing things. Which if you choose to use your time that way it is.
University, what ever the public see with drunk students, teaches you how to manage your time, keep to deadlines and get the work to an acceptable standard.
I have been doing this for 13yrs just gone and have worked with thousands of web design companies (as most of our work is for web design companies), and can see a clear difference between educated and non educated owners and workers.
Educated - Have a clear understanding of what they are doing, they usually work form a business plan, they have a good understanding of technical requirements, they are very methodical in their approach and well organised. It makes no difference what the degree is in, one of the best websites we all know is Rightmove, and the guy who runs that has a masters in English, no qualifications in web stuff at all.
Non educated - Flit around, they are jack of all trades, master of none, they work from post-it notes and are very disorganised, and 99 times out of a hundred its some 50yr old bloke who has gone from one job to another and then decided its easy enough, downloads a cracked copy of Dreamweaver, Uses template clubs (free ones, not paid well made ones) so he will have a stab at it. He won't even post his address, phone number, email, or name on his website and hides it in the whois records, so if things go crap, he can run away and not be found.
He then posts helpful guides on his website, to try and gain the confidence of the visitor that he knows what he is talking about, but actually fills it with spelling mistakes and grammatically incorrect copy which makes him look unprofessional.
He then bad mouths educated people and will eventually say something like "I went to the university of life".
I take people's business ideas and lead them to their own objectives in a cost effective way. Most of the people I have helped I've never done any design for or even actual work apart from finding service, domains names and software.
If somebody comes to you and asks for help, they are not saying "give me the info and i will do it", they could spend 3 or 4 days on the net and find this out. They are coming to you, as they trust your opinion as a professional and be looking for guidance and for you to help through the process in exchange for a little money. Their interest is to work on their business, not to spend time learning a whole new industry.
Exactly what I'm saying is this person does NOT need a web design company.
The above answers that, they don't know how to do the basics of setting up a website, they don't know how to secure it, they don't know almost any of it, most don't even know the term domain name, never mind name server, so yes they need a industry professional to help them along, or they could have spent a lot of time researching instead of contacting you.
You don't walk into an estate agents and ask them whats the best kind of house to buy, should i do a self build and do they know any good private landlords they can use to cut out estate agents...
