@UncleMap, To transition from friends & family site building to commercial work, consider starting with non-profit organizations at no charge. Build three to five truly excellent sites, then point to these from your own truly excellent Web-service-sale site. That way, you'll be forced through the knot hole to learn everything, and you'll develop an admirable work portfolio.

Don't delay by pursuing more abstract, formal learning, even though Jo Ann may be entirely correct about your current skill level. Don't LEARN more, DO more. The DOING will force you to learn. Once you truly have learned, it doesn't matter what critics think. It matters only that your customers are confident that you offer good value.

No offense Halfnium, but trust me when I say Matt needs to learn not just do. He's been just "doing" for months and months and although he's learned a lot, he should have learned it a whole lot faster and a whole lot more had he actually read and learned things rather than just constantly asking questions here with no knowledge whatsoever to start with. This pretty much led to everyone else ending up doing the work for him of which he didn't learn much of anything from. He's still in the stage of making a lot of the mistakes over and over because he didn't learn about it to begin with and just kept trying to wing it.

So from me (and I'm sure many others here on the forums), trust us when we say he needs to "learn" not just "do"

But Jo Ann.... My last 2 logo jobs were re-dos 'cause the original "designers" didn't know 'nuthin' about graphic design. The more people just jump in and do design work (with no training), the more work there is to be had from desperate, disappointed clients.

hahaha Paintbrush, point well taken! We too just got work from someone that had a web builder that just up and left them in the lurch after they completed the college course they were using the business as their class project for lol. That is the type of person that needs to find a whole different line of work!

Cheap work tends to cost a lot in the long run.

Matt had a brilliant saying on one of the sites he (and a couple of us) made some months ago: 'Cheap work ain't good. Good work ain't cheap'.

I agree with both the 'doing' and the 'learning' approach. But they have to work hand in hand!
I started out with notepad in 1996 by 'stealing' a nice site layout, then I changed out all the colours to match my own ideas, and deleted the contents to put in my own. I made a lot of mistakes, but I kept at it until I had got what I wanted, and of course learnt the hex colour system, the (now deprecated) html tags for appearence etc. I changed widths, heights, fonts etc etc. This method I guess would be similar to using a template or theme today, and there is a tad more to learn with css and all that.
I actually didn't have anybody to ask about this until I joined the CC lot in 2005. But by then I had already learnt enough to be able to build and maintain sites with the current standards of that time. In 1996 there were not all that many recourses online, where you could find howtos. That has changed tremendously since then, and it is now full possible to learn the tools to be able tocreate websites without paying anything for it.