Hi Steven, so glad to have come across your blog. Great thoughts here. I work as a freelance web designer, mostly for small businesses, and so a lot of this resonates with me. And it's also reasons for me to be telling myself that I need to climb up to the realms of larger clients.

I think one of the tougher things with small clients is that a web design is sort of a one-n-done deal and it's hard to push for any large retainer that seem more possible with a larger company...or for those who aren't footing the bill from their personal pockets.

For me, building websites for my personal project (an App) seems to bring me the most interest in that I'm trying to think of new ways to rank and who to connect with.

Regarding site builders like Squarespace, I gotta say that I do think they provide great value in offering clients an closed, supported environment that will handle the things that open source platforms require you to do.

I'm actually teaching myself WebFlow right now, which sort of a more complex take on site builders. In a sense, you code "visually"....you need to understand html/css and can get some pretty unique results from it. Check their homepage just to see the interactions that can be built.

Anyhow, thanks for the writings. I'm bookmarking!