Moderate or eliminate the marketplace (even if temporary)

just because designs showing up in the marketplace may have been better then than they are now doesn't make them good.

crowdsourcing has been around forever. the marketplace here really isn't much different in theory: you're still throwing up generic templates that obviously cant be tailored to anything out of the box, thus reducing quality and reducing any leverage for charging a fair price.

designing websites for others does pay what it used to, and in may cases more. it's a matter of how one wants to run their business.

understand websites are just another form of marketing collateral and an extension of a brand, and you can position yourself as a creative, as a director, as someone a client will come to asking the question "what should we do?" then you are in the position to do and charge whatever you want. pump out generic templates, you're going to find people who don't care about their brand who are trying to get as much as they can for as little as they can.

a marketplace may be useful for unloading unused concepts that are beyond salvation in future projects, but designing before a brief of objectives is created is a business plan set up to fail imo, as a design designed with no objectives will obviously never achieve any objectives.


i'm not trying to rain on the parade, now i'm just trying to offer up the piece of advice i never got: being a good designer doesn't mean you're going to do well in the design business. after all, it's a business. if the extent of your business knowledge is going to be working out of your parents house for 1/4 the going rate, that's where you'll stay and those people get weeded out periodically. being good at design and having the ambition to understand the business aspect is going to be the difference maker in getting out of the league of basement dwellers.