Tell me if this is a bad idea.

Hi Brent,

As a web developer/designer for over 10 years, my advice is to pass, unfortunately. Web design customers of any size, in my experience, can quickly become a pain. Though it sounds as simple as putting template up and rocking and rolling, it always becomes an issue of customization that takes time and money. They almost always want you change your beautiful work into an abomination of little additions ("can we put our phone number at the top in big red letters?" "I really think we need a dark mustard yellow background." <-- these are real demands I've gotten.)

My response to this was to only work with the highest budget customers I could find. They are generally relatively professional, trust you to do your job (i.e. tell them when their ideas are stupid), and expect to pay for good work. Any project less than $5K or so was way more trouble than it was worth, in my experience.

There are a couple more issues. The market is completely saturated. Web design templates are to SaaS as cheap t-shirts are to fashion. You will never rank on any relevant keyword unless you are hyper-hyper-specialized.

If you do decide to go with this, however, I recommend you do it the old fashioned way. Rely on you selling to people in your network/community. Maybe $500 for the template, and your hourly rate for customization and anything beyond basic support. Use Cloudflare Pages, also. Amazing product.

Again, my advice is to steer clear, but let me know what you think.

-Blake

Hey Brent!

I'd heavily encourage you to ask this to your potential customers instead of peers on IH. While everyone is here with the best of intentions, the reality is that all the responses here are guesses, and that's it.

You can't know if these customers would be willing to pay $5-$10/month for hosting until you ask them, not us!

I actually just wrote a whole article on this topic on IH today, funny enough.

How about you just master some website builder, buy an unlimited plan for websites and you use this account to share websites for all your customers?

You can create many templates there and use them for your customers.

I would also charge something small for changes on the website, domain hosting, email configuration, etc.

It might work but only if you build a 100% standardized product that you can sell in a self-service manner. No customization. No to very little support. If clients request more, try to cross sell professional services to build webpages for a better rate.

Hi Brent,

Sitedudes is a good business to research if you are interested in this market. They have thousands of customers paying $80+ per month for a simple site. You can charge $100 to $200 per month if you offer free minor edits. Almost no one edits their sites once they are up.

Monthly SEO services are another upsell, that many customers want.

A major selling feature is the chat box they offer. They have a small team that answers messages and forwards them to site owners. I don't see much value in this, but small businesses seem to think it makes them look more professional.

I researched this market a lot in the past. I still think it's a good idea. Feel free to email me if you have any questions.

John

This has been going on for 20 years , from when the internet started , i agree with @Primer This is the type of customer that does not have the budget but will have plenty of requirements. Think of it this way : if you want to do it fulltime , you will need 5K usd to make it work , if you would charge them 250 usd /project you will need to sell and deliver a project every working day of the month. And be sure you will need to visit them to close the sale and have discussions on delivery where customers will not pay because they feel a comma is wrong in a text or an image is not on the right place

Just set up and manage wordpress/wix/squarespace/... for them. If there will be more demand - hire some help and do this as an agency. When you have hundreds of customers - start building your own solution with hosting and etc.

Start small and simple, don't skip steps.

I think you're on the right track, you've identified a problem and found people that are willing to pay to solve this problem.

I've been thinking about putting together some static site templates that I can use to plug in some images and business information and sell it to them instead.
Not a bad way to go, but perhaps you could just use Squarespace for them, and charge them a premium on top of Squarespace.

Squarespace seems to charge $168 annually, why not charge your customers $500 a year?

I'm worried that the type of people drawn to this would be more hassle than they are worth though.
Could be true, but I think it's better to deal with the problem if it happens. I think you're trying to guard against spending too much time on one customer and not scaling your business. Paul G has talked about the benefit of doing things that don't scale:
http://paulgraham.com/ds.html