I think the first quality of a website is to be functional. As a customer I want to know : - what you can do for me and what benefit I will get from that - how you work and whether it will be easy to work together or not - why I should trust you over your competition - the price I should be able to get this information in less than 2-3min, aside from possibly the price. As a customer I want an idea of your pricing because I want to know if I can afford you or not or if you are outlandishly above market pricing, but I can understand you want to know more about the work before getting there. Now the "how" really depends on you. Nobody is going to tell to a photographer to use text to describe his work, photos are better. As a translator you probably need some text, but you can structure it in a visual way with colors, lists, paragraphs, sections, icons. You could potentially use audio for poetry translation to transmit more of the "emotion" of the translation, integrate videos of you or your customers, add a photo to your about page... Just don't overdo it, nobody cares about seeing you invited at an inauguration party for the 47th time. If you need to implement a gallery to host your photos because you can't make them fit in a page without having to scroll too much you definitely overdid it by a lot. The photos/videos should accompany a story, they support it, if you have more photos than things to say, it's probably too much. I'd say if you have a photo more than every other section of text, it's probably too much. You want to avoid using tons of images from stock that tell nothing about you. 1 or 2 is probably fine, but if you have 10-12 images in a page and they are all from stock photos, it's a bad signal to me, the same way than when I see useless fancy wording my bullshitmeter starts screaming at me. That's the kind of customer I am, I care about honesty, some other people may care about other things. In the end, it's all about your customers as well as the goal for your website : what are they buying ? what experience do they like ? What kind of people you want to work with ? What is the website designed to do ? What are you trying to communicate ?

Correct me if I am wrong, but if you need help from a structural engineer, that means you deal with the building structure. I am quite certain that there are legal obligations for this kind of things, and what your manager asked you to do was probably illegal. I don't think I would take that kindly.

@James Scrase if setup is an issue, you can always have a setup fee, and you can waive it for bigger jobs or regular customers. When you rent a server in a datacenter they often do that. As for surveys, I wonder if photos and measures could be taken by customers to save you a trip ? (If you want those jobs and prefer to have higher volume rather than charge for commute).

Language is a tough market with lots of competition (including non-professionals). Translation is perceived as a commodity by many people who want it cheap and can't really tell differences in quality. So I am wondering if you did a good job at demonstrating your value to explain why you would not be competing on price but on quality instead ? I expect if they would have acknowledged your expertise, and that there was a mismatch between your offer and their need ; and probably offered to keep your contact handy in case they had a customer in need of your specific expertise one day. To confirm my suspicion, I headed out to your website. After visiting it, all I can say is that you do "creative punky translation" from Spanish to English, that you like to break rules and that you are "non-corporate, razor-sharp, never beige". That sounds catchy, but I have no idea what that means, and there is no explanation anywhere. So IMHO, not only it doesn't differentiate you from the competition, but it can actually worry people (Does creative translation mean inaccurate? Does breaking rules (presumably created to ensure quality) mean poor quality?...). I am not in your target market, I am not processing advertising/marketing the same way than most people do, and I am lacking context elements. So please take my comment with grain of salt, but I would redesign the website to better convey the value you bring instead of hiding behind vague words. I agree with the others that you did good to refuse to negotiate your price, their goal was clearly to get the cheapest service they could. That said, the way they answered makes it look like they didn't understand the value you had to offer. And if I judge by your website, it seems to be an area that can be improved. But again, maybe I am wrong and you are charging very high fees already and having no issue finding customers to pay those. Though it's not the vibe I have from your post.

@Ana Beard It should be fairly easy to get the price they charge customers. All you need to do is to request a quote (obviously ask a friend to do it since they know your name). From there, I expect their margin is 30-60% and the bigger the agency, the more they would take (but google it up to be sure). So the rest is pretty much the maximum you could have gotten. You can do that with multiple agencies and see what price they practice on average, and therefore have an idea of the price they want to pay, if that's of some interest to you.

When I doubt I try to be pragmatic. Bear in mind I have no experience with social media marketing, but here is my thought process. Do my target customers use social media ? And which (linkedin, tiktok, facebook...) ? How often do they use them ? Are they likely to see the ads ? Most tech savvy people will use ad blockers for example, some people use social media in a very specific fashion (like recruiters importing profiles into their recruitment tool instead of looking at them directly), many people in EU disable profiling so they only see generic ads.... Are they likely to positively respond to the ad ? Or would it be a negative one ? Luxury brands will not usually do social media because it makes them look "cheap". But a social media marketing agency that you found through social media ads ? Probably a testament to their skill. Can I convey the message I need in the format of ad that I would have available ? Am I selling something that people will likely buy that way ? Am I trying to do something else that requires a lot of people to see it, like institutional communication after a rebranding ? So in the case of a carpenter. I am probably not going to trust somebody based on a ad, I'd want to have it recommended to me, or at the very least I am going to google and try to compare. Also I am not buying carpentry service every month, so there is a high chance that I see an ad many years before I need the service and such. So for a carpenter, I'd probably stick with construction companies, customer referrals, real estate agencies, other artisans (plumber, electrician, painter...)... Basically anybody involved when you buy or restore a house that could recommend you. I would target those specifically with different channels for each if needed. Obvisouly SEO is also required. For a building cleaning service, I'd do the same, targeting whomever is involved (rental agencies, big corporation owning a building, people that bought a new house X years ago if your country allows you to find those records, small shops that look dirty...)