There's a lot more to being a successful web designer than designing good web sites. The key to running a profitable business is to know that your job is actually to satisfy your client.
This section provides guidelines from our experience of running web teams and our own agency, which we hope will help you be more successful and more fulfilled.
A lot of web designers and developers undercharge, due to a combination of underconfidence and lack of understanding about brand. In fact, charging more can make your life much easier. This article explains how.
I love Basecamp for 2 reasons. It's not only a great example of making a complex process simple through good web application design, plus it's a very useful service for web designers & developers to boot.
Basecamp lets me quickly and easily manage projects with clients and developers in different parts of the world, by helping me easily:
Set up and track lists of tasks (which you can optionally associate with project milestones)
Discuss work, ideas and anything else using messages and collaborative documents
Get automatic notifications when things need doing, when comments have been made, and when things get done
... and lots of other stuff you can find out for yourself!
Basecamp is free to try out, and I thoroughly recommend checking it out if you have client projects that are even moderately complex.