The first website I built professionally was for a friend’s dad in 2014. He paid me £200, the brief was “make it look modern”, and I delivered something I would now refuse to put my name on. I learned a lot from that build. Most of it about myself.
I’ve built more than 55 WordPress websites since then. The ones I’m proudest of aren’t always the ones with the biggest budgets, the most awards, or the cleverest interactions. They’re the ones where I picked the right client, set the right scope, and held my line when the project tried to drift.
Most of the lessons I’ve learned the hard way are about saying no. Not theatrically. Not loudly. Just clearly, early, and without apologising for it.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
1. The cheapest projects are almost always the most expensive
I used to take on £400 builds because I was nervous about turning paid work away. Every one of them ate four times the time I’d quoted and earned me a fraction of the rate I’d have made on a properly priced job.
The pattern was always the same. Client picks a price tier they can afford. Project starts. Scope creeps. They want one more page. Then another. They have a friend who’s seen something they’d like to copy. The contact form should also book appointments and integrate with their accounting software, can you sort that.
I’d say yes because I felt I owed them something, given the budget. They’d be frustrated when it took longer. I’d be frustrated when I worked weekends to deliver. Everyone lost.
What I do now: my starter package starts at £800, and that’s the floor. Below that I’m not interested. It’s not arrogance — it’s the fact that anything cheaper either makes me resent the work or short-changes the client. Both of those outcomes hurt the relationship more than turning the project down would have.
2. “We’ll just see how it goes” is a refusal disguised as a yes
If a client can’t tell you what they’re trying to achieve in a few sentences, they don’t know yet. That’s fine. What’s not fine is starting the project anyway and trying to work it out as you go.
I’ve started projects on vague briefs and they’ve all gone the same way. Six weeks in, the client realises they wanted something different. We’ve already designed three pages they no longer like. We’re rebuilding from a position where I’ve now sunk too many hours to walk away cleanly. Nobody wins.
The fix is uncomfortable but it works. If the brief isn’t clear enough to quote against, I send the client back to do their thinking before we start. I’ll happily run a paid discovery session — two or three hours where we figure out what success actually looks like for them. But I won’t begin building until we both know what we’re building.
Some clients don’t come back from that. That’s the whole point. The ones who do are ready, and those projects almost always go well.
3. Some clients want a website. Others want a therapist.
Early in my career I’d take on whoever could pay. I learned slowly that some clients aren’t really looking for a website. They’re looking for someone to validate decisions they’ve already made, or to be a sounding board for business issues that have nothing to do with design.
You can spot them quickly if you’re paying attention. The 90-minute discovery call where they talk about their family. The “quick question” emails that arrive every other day for six months. The brief that changes after every conversation they have with their accountant, their wife, their golf partner.
None of this makes them bad people. Some of my favourite clients have come from this group. But I’ve stopped pretending it’s free. Either we work in a way that respects both our time, or I’m not the right person.
What this looks like in practice: I cap revisions in the contract. I bill for ad-hoc strategy sessions that aren’t part of the build. I hold a hard line on scope. The clients who push back when I do this are the ones I’d have ended up resenting anyway.
4. Working with someone you don’t respect is bad for your work
I’ve taken on three projects in my career where I had a real instinct, in the first conversation, that the client and I didn’t see things the same way. I took them on anyway. All three ended badly.
Not catastrophically. The websites went live. The invoices got paid. But the work was worse than my normal standard, the relationship was strained throughout, and in two of the three cases the client and I have never spoken again.
The reason is straightforward. When you don’t respect a client’s judgement, every design decision becomes a fight. You start hedging your work to avoid an argument. You compromise on details that matter. The end product reflects the friction it was made under.
I’m not suggesting you only work with people who agree with you. The best clients I’ve had have pushed back on my work, sometimes hard, and the work was better for it. But there’s a difference between disagreement that sharpens the project and disagreement that erodes it. The former feels like collaboration. The latter feels like trench warfare. If the trial conversations feel like trench warfare, that won’t change once you’re contracted.
5. The work in your portfolio decides the work that comes next
This is the lesson I learned latest and the one that’s changed my business the most. The websites I take on now are largely a function of the websites I’ve already built. Clients hire designers whose portfolio looks like the kind of work they want.
If your portfolio is full of cheap rushed jobs for people who didn’t really care about design, that’s the brief you’ll keep getting. If your portfolio is full of considered, distinctive work for clients who valued the craft, that’s the brief you’ll start to get.
The implication is uncomfortable. If you want a different kind of work, you have to turn down the kind you have. You have to say no to projects that aren’t going to make your portfolio better, even when they’re paid.
For me that meant turning down a chunk of work in 2023 that was profitable but generic. I’ve earned less in the short term. The work I’m getting now is more interesting, better paid, and more likely to lead to the next one.
6. Saying no isn’t a moral position. It’s resource allocation.
I want to be honest about something. None of this is about me being precious. I’m a small business. I need to pay a mortgage. I take on projects that aren’t perfect for me regularly because the bills don’t pay themselves on principle.
But I’ve learned to think of my time the same way I think of my hosting capacity. Finite. Worth more when used well. Wasted when given to the wrong things. Saying no to one project is the only way I can say yes properly to another.
What I’ve stopped doing: feeling guilty about it. The clients I’ve turned down have always found someone else. The world hasn’t stopped. Some of them have come back two years later with a different project and a different attitude. Some of them haven’t, and that’s also fine.
The version of me who said yes to everything in 2017 was poorer, more stressed, and shipping worse work than the version of me who says no now. I can’t see a single advantage to going back.
7. What I still struggle with
I’d be lying if I said I had this figured out.
I still take on projects I shouldn’t, sometimes because the timing’s right and the alternative is a quiet month. I still let scope creep on jobs where I like the client too much to push back. I still send invoices for less than I should because I knocked something out faster than expected and feel weird charging for the time I didn’t visibly spend.
The lesson here, if there is one, is that running a freelance design business is mostly a series of small judgement calls about which work to accept and which to decline. There’s no spreadsheet that tells you the right answer. There’s only experience, instinct, and the willingness to listen to the second one when it disagrees with your nervous system.
If you’re newer to freelancing and you’re reading this thinking how do I know when to say no — the honest answer is you usually do know. The hard part is acting on it.
Get good at acting on it.
If you’re thinking about your own next project
Most of what I’ve written here is from the freelancer’s side of the table. If you’re a business owner reading this and you’ve been on the receiving end of a designer who said yes when they should have said no, that’s not your fault. The right response from the designer’s side is clear scope, honest pricing, and the willingness to push back. You should expect all three.
If you’d like a conversation about a project that doesn’t sound like the bad ones I’ve described in this post, you can get in touch through the contact page. Twenty minutes, no pitch, just a straight read on whether we’re a fit.
