How to be a web designer?

Hi all,
I am about to design my site which I will sell my services as a web designer hopefully, I looked around and I haven't yet reached such good work like others on the net this is my first step and i am wondering if anyone here could help shed light on what's the minimum required and how and where to start this new venture, whether it's a good source of income and how to compete with the big cats around who provide all sorts of things. much appreciated

Anymore, customer's will want a site that can manage their content, so this will always include programming. The bigger companies usually employ designers, who create the look/layout of the site, and programmers who write the code for the site.

If you don't have both "designing" skills AND "programming" skills, you'll be hard pressed to find customers.

I once worked as a programmer for a larger website design company. The designer's always had a large catalog of "generic" images and a vast amount of pre-built layouts, etc... So although the customer thought they were getting a "one off" custom site, it was really just one of the design groups templates, with maybe some slight modifications thrown in to make it unique to that customer.

The programming department had pre-built functionality/objects for news sections, blogs, forums, shopping carts, etc... All we did was run a database script that built the tables/columns that were required, then added the pre-built coded pages (.asp, .php, etc...). Then we tested it.

With the cost of web design/programming being so low. It's extremely difficult to make any money unless you can build the sites quickly, which requires have pre-built (plugins) objects.