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I'm currently in the process of starting up a business in the UK, creating websites for a specific market. I'm happy to talk about what I'm doing specifically, and my progress, assuming it's actually a good idea to talk about a business idea before it's up and running. There are other firms doing the same thing so it's not a new idea that someone could steal. I also work as an accountant in practice so have quite a lot of exposure to other small firms getting started and growing so can hopefully offer some advice, although it will be based on UK businesses and might not apply.
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Sep 24, 2011 12:12
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So I thought I would write some more about the business I'm developing, I guess either people will find lots of issues that I haven't thought of, or maybe interested on following progress, I don't know. If it sounds a bit rambling I apologise, I've just kind of written as stuff comes into my head. Essentially I want to start producing websites for accountancy practices in the UK. I've come at this from the accountancy side of things as I am a chartered accountant, and I have seen not only quite a few awful websites, I've also prepared accounts for firms that take in quite a lot of money while being awful at running their business, and frankly I think I can do better. My main obstacle (and it's a pretty big obstacle) is my lack of knowledge on the web design/development side. I've always poked around with websites but the more I do the more I realise I have a lot still to learn. On the other hand, looking at the competitors in the market, they all use basically the same content on each website they produce, so a lot of the work will boil down to a creating a design and tweaking bits of the website to be specific to each practice, which obviously isn't straightforward, but I think I can pick it up pretty quickly. Of the competitors, there's around 5 that cater specifically to accountancy practices, and they range in price from around £100-£250 a month. My old firm pays £150 a month for a website that hasn't been changed in the last 3 years, looks awful and doesn't work properly. Obviously there is also competition from generic web design firms, however the specific firms differentiate themselves with a decent amount of technical content, tax calculators and so on, which I would also be able to produce because of my background (my problem from here is the time it will take to produce). I've pretty much decided that I'm happiest using Wordpress as a CMS for this - I've played around with Drupal & Joomla and found Wordpress easier to use and it's more than adequate for what I need to do. I've designed one website in Fireworks, turned that into HTML/CSS then turned that into a working Wordpress theme - it looks crap but it was more to get familiar with how things work. While I really want to focus specifically on the accountancy practices, I'm starting to think it'll be worth offering up generic web design for whomever, particularly when I'm getting started. The extra money will be helpful while I'm still trying to get clients for the accountancy side of things, and it'll be useful training as well. It also keeps me doing some other interesting stuff while I produce a lot of dry technical content to get that side going. So that's kind of where I'm at - What I am doing at present is training on Fireworks/Illustrator with tutorials at lynda.com, there's also a set of videos on logo design that looks like it could be interesting but I'll get to grips with Illustrator first as it uses that. After that I'm going to carry on making up websites (for examply my mum sings in a choir and does their website, I'm redoing it now, although she doesn't know that!). When I'm happier with how long it's taking to make things, and also with the final product, I will be looking into the best way to host things, considering how I want to price things (particularly on the general side of things), company structure (I'll almost certainly set up a Limited Company for this), and a number of other things I can't recall right now. If people are interested with how I am getting on I'll try and update here on a fairly regular basis. I'm also very interested in issues people might see, obvious things I've missed, reasons why it won't work so I can address them before I stray too far down the wrong path.
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Oct 13, 2011 21:42
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Turdpunch posted:Unless you have a natural flair for good design, CSS/HTML etc i wouldn't waste too much time trying to learn the skills to develop sites better than other bottom of the barrel outfits. Theres so many 'completed websites for £199' deals that its really not worth entering. Thanks for this feedback - I've been busy recently so not had a chance to step in and reply. Ideally I want to focus specifically on accountancy practices - pretty much the same as what these guys do http://www.accountantwebsmiths.co.uk/ - and this is how I'd compete with the other hundreds of similar firms because I'd have the content that's tailored for their businesses. I'm doing some courses through lynda.com so I am more familiar with everything really and also so I'm able to do any other work I can get my hands on whilst I build up clients for the accountancy side of thing. I have to say this is going a bit slower than I'd hoped due to life but I'm getting back in the swing of things now.
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Oct 31, 2011 20:54
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Turdpunch posted:That's sort of my point - if your skillset lies in the accountancy side of things, why invest the time/effort into learning web design at such an early stage? You make some good points, thanks! I guess I was also kind of interested in learning the design side of things but all the content to go onto the websites is quite substantial, so I think creating that and learning how to do everything else would just never get done probably in all honesty. Hopefully I will get the chance to learn that side of things in future though.
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Nov 6, 2011 23:00
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