I'm at this place that I find myself in on a regular basis as a business owner. A point where I feel things need to either grow or shrink if I'm going to avoid driving myself nuts with work. I should have an employee to do some of the web work for me. Not the new projects necessarily, but if I could find someone to lend me a hand with updating old sites that sure would be great.Being a tiny (my wife and I) design studio makes it tough to bring anyone else on board. First, theres the local base of humans to fill the role. This is all but out of the question. If you knew anyone around here you'd understand...Outsourcing? I dunno. It kinda defies my principals.
Over the last few years I've built up a pretty nice client list. Along with this large list of clients comes a large, varied and continuously evolving list of responsibilities. This is because almost every time I create a site I can expect at least a small amount of maintenance in the future.
50 or so websites later I have a full filing cabinet and more maintenance work. These days more and more of the maintenance work involves some sort of SEO rather than performing my actual craft.
Mix this with deadlinBuilding one site after another fortunately makes my coding better all the time. Unfortunately I feel that none of the sites are as good as they could be. I have to let each one go as they reach the point we have agreed that would define "completed". Then I have to let it go, show it to the public and hate it a couple months later.
I look at a site like http://realtor.com and it today seems apparent that their site is better than anythign I'll ever produce. Why? Because they have an entire staff working on the site night and day. Panels reviewing the site and offering feedback and continuing the improvement cycle.
The "Improvement Cycle". Perhaps I just coined that - I don't know or care right now. The point is that in my business there rarely exists such a cycle. Instead its just a create, review, accept, move on situation. Really, thats not too bad. In fact if I wasn't so hard on myself, I could be happy with that on move on to the next.
Part of me hates that though. Part of me feels that all my skills are wasted building little sites, rather than working on a big one everyday.
Maybe this though pattern means I'm just irritated today. Maybe it means I'm taking on too many projects that I shouldn't instead of shooting for bigger projects that allow for more refinement over time.
Maybe, just maybe this is the perfect opportunity for some large corporation in a nice state like Vermont to offer me a sweet job working on their flagship website.
Ok, no. I couldn't go back to working for anyone else. Nevermind that concept.