In reply to Rick.

Yeah reading is necessary - the truth is that our industry is so vivid and develops itself more and more on a daily basis, so keeping yourself up to date requires constant learning. And Internet wasn't widely available back in the time when I started programming, too. And lots of people think that WordPress is easy, so it's only natural that they should know it as the back of their hands, period. Which is the main problem from my perspective.

However, there's one aspect that I would like to reply to from your previous comment. You've mentioned that meetings are the key and everything, and freelancers and small agencies struggle with that since they don't take on a large percentage of the projects and they waste a lot of time. While that's true (and somewhat valid), a waterfall model is not the only successful one in the industry - or it may even be dangerous given some recent standards. A more agile, scrum-based approach could be much more effective that requires continuous work and adaptivity, which leads to great results based on the context at any given moment, and a long-term partnership.

Tons of meetings at first usually lead to signing off a one-time project, contract, which ends up with trying to get the most as quickly as possible, in order not to hurt the margins. I've seen that too many times, and while the hourly model is not related to value either, a hybrid one could be a nice fit that actually gets the contractor/agency involved with the future of their client.