is it me or are designers charging too much?

[shadowbox]

We're no 1 in Google for '(our city name) web developers', and '(our city name) consultants (and variations) - must account for 1% of Google referrals for us!

[optimus_prime]

I like sitting down and working out how I'm going to help make someone lots of money, I like to see them succeed thanks to my input. It's a big jigsaw puzzle with lots of different pieces that all need to fit together (design, usability, marketing, customer support, retention, admin, content management, training, expansion etc etc) - this is why I refer to myself as a consultant - although I still have to optimise my site for 'web designer' because no one ever searches for 'web consultant' on Google

Couldn't agree more. It's funny, even though I am what many people would call a "web designer" or "web developer" I probably spend less than half of my time doing that. The rest of the time, I'm coming up with strategies, proposing ideas, doing research, delegating tasks, etc... My job really reminds me of The Apprentice since I'm always working on a new project, with a new industry, learning the tricks and competing to beat out the competition.

[Moni-Q]

Nero2 - could you let us know what you think is an acceptable price to charge for a custom modification of a VBulletin skin? With that info, we would have a better idea of the kind of level of service you should be getting form your freelancer/agency/teenager on his lunch break

As to inefficient use of time, well this my friend is the real world where professionals do things properly, and this takes time - i.e. we don't just say

'Yeh, I'll make a skin for ya - in red you say? Cool man, I'll knock something up when I get the chance. Yeah, yeah, don't worry, you'll like it, trust me....'

When someone approaches a professional, be it an agency or a freelancer, they should be getting spec gathering processes, concepts, approvals, rounds of revisions, testing, final approvals, support, guarantees etc. Going to some faceless username on a rentacoder type site is not going to get you much of that.

Pay poxy fees, get poxy work and poxy service. But if your web site is poxy anyway, you're laughing - a match made in heaven - so in this case, you are probably asking the wrong people for advice because most of us here don't deal with poxy.

Couldn't have said it better myself.