Designed and developed a website for a web3 client, they have cleared all invoices, only 1 authentication page remained for which they wanted some time to get back.

It's been 2 months and nobody got back, I have followed up via email and the company's discord server (where the last activity was 4 months ago) but nobody has replied to me.

Now I am sitting with a fully functional website which idk what to do with. This has never happened before. Should I worry or move on with my life ?

I've been a full stack developer for about 5 years working mainly with Laravel, React, and AWS.

I recently built a site for my brother's business, and it made me start seriously considering opening a small web agency/freelance business instead of continuing traditional employment.

For those running agencies or freelancing in 2026:

• Is the market still strong with AI tools becoming so common?
• How do you handle pricing and scope?
• Do you use frameworks/custom stacks or mostly no-code tools?
• How do you structure hosting, maintenance, and billing?
• What do you wish you knew before starting?

Would especially appreciate insight from developers who transitioned from employment into client work.

I'm just starting to learn web design and I'm feeling discouraged.

Right now I'm building a website in WordPress using Elementor. I know HTML and CSS, but I'm still getting the hang of everything. I've been working on this site for around 14 days because I'm learning as I go.

What keeps getting to me is seeing everyone around me using AI tools like Lovable (dont get me wrong i ask AI for css help) and similar builders that seem to create websites in a day. I'm also seeing people offering complete websites for like 100 €, which makes me assume they're using AI and pumping them out quickly.

It makes me wonder if I should even continue learning and building websites this way if other people can do it cheaper and faster.

What do you suggest? How should I approach this?

I really like to think of myself as not being a particularly bitter or petty person.

But, after my former employer parachuted in a new CMO and Head of Brand, laid off the entire brand team (myself while in the midst of paternity leave no less...), spent half a year and who-knows-how-much-money with a major creative agency... I'm a little pleased to see the final result is a tasteless, middle-of-the-road refresh, sloppily executed, turd.

Don't get me wrong, I miss having an income, but it is thrilling to know that the internal process to get this piss-poor result would have been hell and I didn't have to be a part of it.

not talking about massive redesigns or expensive custom development either

i mean small changes that actually moved the needle

things like:

rewriting a headline simplifying the homepage adding pricing changing CTA buttons adding reviews removing animations improving mobile spacing showing real photos instead of stock photos etc

honestly i’ve seen some businesses get better results from simplifying their site than from adding more “features”

would actually love hearing real examples from business owners/designers because conversion behavior has felt really different lately

it feels strange how something so small can still be so painful to design well.On a normal website, a simple layout with a logo, name, role, links, and spacing is easy. But once it has to work inside Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, mobile apps, replies, forwards, dark mode, and different company email clients, it starts feeling less like web design and more like debugging old email templates. The biggest issue I keep seeing is that the signature can look clean when first sent, then start breaking after a few replies or when viewed in another client. Images resize weirdly, spacing changes, links get underlined, columns collapse, and anything too modern feels risky.

I work in a tiny team, 2 designers, 1 pm and 3 devs and we cant settle on a UX wire-framing tool that holds up when we all jump in together.

when its solo everything is fine and stays neat, but once its a collab it just turns into a big mess. we gave up and tried separate tools one for wireframes one for prototypes but now its nonstop exporting importing screenshots and describing clicks by hand.

does anyone know a tool that keeps wire-frames organised, lets a few ppl brainstorm live and manage comments without cluttering? I would appreciate it.

I’m a designer/developer working on a custom website + ordering system for an established restaurant in Netherlands and wanted to know what freelancers/agencies would realistically quote for something like this.

The project includes a custom frontend, online food ordering, cart + payments, customer accounts with saved addresses, table reservations, admin dashboard, basic order tracking, notifications/email automation, and backend/database setup. The restaurant already has its own delivery drivers and bikes, so no marketplace/rider infrastructure is needed.

Likely stack is Framer + Supabase + Stripe/PayPal. Could change these later on depending on the project requirements.

What would you charge for this kind of project realistically?

Monorepo earlier would’ve saved us months once projects started sharing components

Custom auth was almost never worth it using managed auth made life easier

Docker even for “simple” apps avoided so many deployment headaches

Error monitoring before launch should be standard, not an afterthought

Defining technical deliverables in contracts prevented endless revisions

Looking back, some of these feel obvious now, but they cost us a lot to learn the hard way.

What’s one technical decision you made early in a project that paid off later or one you wish you’d made sooner?

Hi everyone,

// Also just to be clear, I had AI help me write this post, my technical english is not that good and I had trouble explaining exactly my issue, sorry if this feels too... formal...

I’m struggling with a UI/UX problem around mixing auto-saved controls and manually saved form fields on the same screen.

Here’s the use case:

A user profile has some basic fields like:

• First name
• Last name
• Location
• Other standard profile information

The same user also has a list of skills. Each skill is stored as a related database object, with a name and a value. In the UI, these skills are represented with sliders.

On the same screen, I’d like to display:

• The basic profile fields, which are only saved when the user clicks a button like “Save” or “Update”
• The skill sliders, which update directly in the database as soon as the user changes their value

My issue is: how do I make it clear to the user that some changes require clicking a save button, while others are saved instantly?

If everything is shown at the same visual level, I’m worried users will naturally click “Save” even after changing only sliders, even though that button has nothing to do with the sliders.

Things I’ve tried or considered:

1. Showing toast notifications after auto-saved slider changes This gets noisy very quickly, especially when the user changes multiple sliders in a row.
2. Splitting the page into tabs One tab for basic profile fields and one tab for skills. This is clearer conceptually, but the basic profile tab feels almost empty and visually awkward.
3. Using cards or separate sections I tried isolating the profile fields and skills into separate cards, but I still can’t find a layout that makes the behavior obvious enough.

So my questions are:

• Are there established UX patterns for mixing auto-save and manual-save interactions on the same screen?
• Should auto-saved controls and manually saved fields always be visually separated?
• Is it better to avoid mixing these two behaviors entirely?
• How would you structure this kind of page so users immediately understand what is saved automatically and what requires confirmation?
• Is there a generally recommended or “safe” pattern for this?

I’d love to hear how you would approach this from a UX/UI design perspective.

I’ve got a website I’m building and I’d rather focus on brand design at the moment and spread the work of our story to a professional. What can I expect?

I'm not talking about coding, but rather the things that become really frustrating after years in the field team issues, changing technology, burnout, poor architecture decisions, management pressure, etc. I'm curious what gets harder rather than easier with experience.