How to organize a website development team and delegate tasks correctly?

Question

Work organization

Guys! Who at one time was faced with the task of organizing the work of a team to develop sites (worth $ 200-1000), as well as to promote them?
And who, later, managed to grow into a web studio, albeit not a big one. Please share your experience.
My situation and the task that I really want to solve: I
already have a portfolio of 5 sites, of average scall, on wordpress and joomla.
The latter developed more or less on a serious basis - with technical specifications, a contract, design in photoshop, cms wordpress. It's been 2 months.
I realized that it is unrealistic to do it alone with a unique design, and the quality suffers.
What's the best way to do it? Take a part-time designer or a freelancer/student as an assistant designer?
Or is it better to take a layout designer and take ready-made templates and finish it yourself?
Or is 2 people not enough to create websites with a budget of $200-1000?
Maybe it makes sense to organize partnerships with other studios and delegate part of the work to them?
I would be grateful for any advice! Thank you.

Answer 1

For $200, no team will work. For studios, the cost of the project rises 4-5 times ($1000 instead of $200) against what can be done alone. Just because you have to share.
You can work with some freelancer, but this is partly a risk, but after a couple of projects you can already achieve mutual understanding, initiative and other qualities that are necessary when fulfilling orders.
I work with a team of marketer+programmer+coder+analyst. We make designs similar to what high-quality competitors do, we finalize them to fit our goals.
A partnership with studios makes sense only if you are just looking for customers for them, and they do all the work, giving you % of the project cost. Otherwise, splitting the project into parts and performing the task by different teams will create a bunch of additional problems and time delays, which is unacceptable for the customer.
Look for contacts of good freelancers, motivate them well, give them nice bonuses. If there is an opportunity to meet face-to-face and do projects together, do so. Work will go 10 times faster.
Always make a contract with TOR and implementation deadlines, a description of the procedures for accepting work, and so on. This will save you from a variety of unpleasant situations at all stages of work.
Hope the answer is helpful.
Read K.Bakshta "Big Contracts" - go to a new level. You will have to sell for $1000 what you used to sell for $200, but now you yourself realize the benefits of the division of labor. The quality of the service should improve if you know how to work with people.

Answer 2

1. Look for adequate freelancers with a similar style of thinking and views - so there are more chances that you will work together. To unite not only to work for money, but also to come up with additional cooperation, for example, some kind of joint Open Source project, or a commercial product - both can be a plugin / theme for WordPress or something similar. For example, the theme comes in two versions - free Lite for WordPress.org and promo yourself, paid Pro for ThemeForest. Such additional work will allow you to always be in the same boat and work more closely for the common good, this will also affect commercial projects. In addition, this is always a bonus for the client - for example, in orders for WordPress, the client sees that my guys and I hang on WordPress.org as plugin / theme developers, one of us generally contributes to the WP core. This is a big plus in karma.
2. Do not increase the team unnecessarily. 1 person frontend, 2nd - backend. At first, a designer is better at design. Grow strictly as needed, although new people must be sought in advance and tested in real work. That is, there should be a permanent "core" of the team, and a few more in the wings. At first they are in the wings (and work on their own the rest of the time), over time, one of them will move to the core as they grow.
3. Studios/agencies need to work backwards. Many of them often have blockages and lack of their own resources, you should be their contractors, and not vice versa.
4. Budgets. Most importantly :) Someone smart once said:
Which means that the quality of customers directly depends on your prices. And secondly, from experience - plus or minus hemorrhoids is the same in a project with a budget of $200, and in a project with a budget of $2000. The same amount of time and effort is spent on finding/attracting a client. And more often than not, those who pay $2,000 value time, work, and don't have a brain unless it's absolutely necessary (see quote above).
5. Reduce the cost of customer acquisition (cost means both time and money). Repeat/loyal customers are everything to us. Leave clients on support, make them re-apply with improvements / development of their projects, come with new orders, advise others. For example, I finished an interesting project yesterday for a repeat client. The first order was small fixes of a paid template, 2 hours of work / $60, through the exchange. Some time later, he applied for a whole site for his father's business. Adequate budget. Done, launched yesterday. He already has a list of new features for this site ready again, in a month he will return somewhere with them and load him with work again. With at least a dozen of these clients, you can fill half of the working time without wasting time looking for new clients. And there is no crap with them,
6. In order for item 5 to actually happen, it is not enough just to do the job on time and well. It is necessary to help the client, to train him, to advise. Recently there was a case - a client came with a standard task to fix a paid template according to his requirements. After digging into this horror and asking a bunch of the right questions, it became clear that this template was not suitable for him at all for these tasks. The project was reoriented to development from scratch, the budget was changed from $120 to completely different figures. After all, the task is not just to press buttons and code something there, but to help the client solve his problems. The result as a whole is important to him, and not the number of lines of code that you wrote, or how well this code is formatted.
7. Reduce the cost of development. Accumulate standard solutions, code that can (and should) be reused. In the case of ready-made CMS (and this is the most common format of work) - buy developer unlimited licenses for those plugins that save time. For example, once we bought ACF Pro for WordPress, we significantly reduced the amount of work on each project. Now we will take Gravity Forms or Ninja Forms in order to solve the issue with forms and custom frontends, which consume a lot of time and effort in development even with their own developments. Plus some small decisions that are often needed.
8. Write a development strategy for yourself. Clearly understand where we want to go and in what time frame (plus or minus), clearly define what to do, what moves in this direction and what does not. Then there will be a chance to grow from a bunch of freelancers into a studio or something like that. Without a strategic vision, freelancing is a squirrel in a wheel and a vicious circle. The eternal pursuit of little money "to devour and save for vacation." The strategy can be different, for example, "grow into a studio", "create your own commercial projects / online services", "become a god in one specific area and collect cream from all freelance exchanges - get the fattest projects in this niche", etc. d.

Answer 3

For example, I work in tandem with a designer + layout designer and we can do it quite well without outside help.

Answer 4

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