Why my business model is gradually changing

As a self-employed web developer, I've seen some interesting trends in the past couple of years. One is that many, many more clients seem to be "shopping" for a web developer, requesting estimates from a number of us and then choosing the cheapest. This doesn't work well for me, since I find that an accurate estimate for a web site project - even a "small" one - takes me at least several hours to complete. My answer to this is to be a lot choosier as to who I'm willing to provide a free estimate for, these days.

Another trend is more interesting: I'm getting calls from programmers who have lots of back-end work for clients and consider themselves design-challenged. I love design, and I love designing with HTML and CSS, so these gigs may work out well.

As some of you know, I'm now also working as an off-site administrative assistant, doing a wide variety of work for my clients, all from my own location and on my own time. Maintaining web sites is still one of my main responsibilities, but I'm also handling some other promotion-related work, such as the production of podcasts and the maintenance of contact databases.