So I'm going to be brutally honest with you...I was a freelance web designer in college and I completely agree with what you're saying. The trouble is, the solu

So I'm going to be brutally honest with you...I was a freelance web designer in college and I completely agree with what you're saying. The trouble is, the solution is already out there... www.vistaprint.com/websites.aspx DISCLAIMER: Yes, I work for them, and yes I built that page. But you guys aren't our market (too savvy) so I posted it because you probably didn't even know we made websites. If I were still a freelancer THAT would scare me. The price point is exactly in the budget of your stereotyped user - $200 is like the price of the PROFESSIONAL package, you could go even cheaper for the simplest stuff. As SHOwnsYou pointed out, paying commodity prices is using boilerplate, and that is EXACTLY what we use...there's no magic tricks here: we make it easy for non-technical baby boomers and older (the LEAST tech savvy) to have a website at a price they can afford. The UI is simple enough for a 40-yr-old business owner to make a site. And to the point of the original poster, yeah we are capitalizing on a booming market. I think the problem is that people want what they can't have: a beautiful looking site at a great price. As I said, speaking frankly, you get what you pay for with our templates. I would never have created those templates and called them my work as a freelancer, but I think the HN community of aesthetically-seasoned designers/developers/entrepreneurs generally forgets that the overwhelming majority has NO IDEA what good design is like and truly DOESN'T need it. This is perhaps the BIGGEST lesson I've learned about business, and truly echoes the sentiments of the greatest creed in marketing, "KNOW YOUR TARGET MARKET." I guess in the end, the problem from a web designer is that they refuse to produce commodity work, and justifiably raises their rates, when they COULD be making money hand-over-fist if they just kept a slew of simple, cheap templates and just did the labor of porting them to a website for their customers and charging next to nothing. Each transaction would seem like peanuts to most freelancers, and they would feel like they aren't earning anything, but this is a numbers game, and the numbers don't lie.