Is it worth grabbing small website jobs any more?

We've been doing small business websites, which used to be bread and butter work, especially when we were sole traders. But recently we've been making the decision to throw back some of these jobs, and give more of an advice role in the customer producing their own websites.
More often than not, the customer doesn't appreciate the work involved in doing something like set up a simple website, with contacts page, and allowing to change content on a few pages. Perhaps adding a gallery for uploading previous work.
By the time we tie down branding and logo, ease of use, navigation, and guiding the users eyes around the pages. Then building the structure and the admin side CMS, and making it SEO friendly (W3 standards, and all the Google toys set up) your looking at minimum 3 days work so over a grand and creeping up to 6K.
The customers response might be:
"Ooooph I only want a 6 page website, I was thinking more along the lines of 3 or 400 sheets?"
So is the market coming to an end for this sized customer?
We used to always take work on, and thought as long as work was coming our way then we couldn't fail.
However, this end of the market, the small business that wants an online presence, or has had a simple electronic business card type website for years and wants a little more now, is turning into a non profit minimum wage job. If another design house does manage to sell the solution at a higher price then they take the profit and pass the technical stuff to us. Either way we get squeezed to produce the mechanics. Looking to the future, it becomes hard to see how the business is going to boom. The customers are seeing more and more automatic tools for creating templated sites, and wonder why a tailoring company charges so much. They are right to feel this too, the tools out there to get yourself a web presence or online shop are now vast, and it might be better for customers to take a little time and do it themselves, or employ a student at a cheaper rate to set up the CMS packages for them.
We are now actively turning them away and giving more of an advice service to get them to use tools such as Google Apps.
We did ask, should we be developing more of a generic CMS system ourselves that allows us to quickly knock out a website for someone, but over the last 10 years I have known at least 2 other businesses that have wanted this. The theory is back 15 years ago when I was doing my Computer Science Degree, the new buzzword was Object Oriented Programming. It was this great new thing utilising Borland C++, and was the wave of the future. It was going to allow us to create objects and eventually these objects can all be pulled off of the shelf and plugged into each other making systems development easier.
Well that never really went according to plan, the way the university envisaged it, although we do write code for reuse ability, chances are when we come to reuse it, there is some new way, or new technology we have to consider and so rewrite or even recreate the object.
But like I say other companies have tried and failed at CMS systems, and when I see the successful ones (Kentico, Sharepoint, or Commonspot) then to accommodate for all of the individual things a customer might want, these have turned into a programming language in their own right that could easily have a training course purely for themselves, so have moved away from the easy off the shelf packages they first tried to be.

So where is the money now at in IT?
We are skilled, I can get a computer to do anything, so if I try and leave the minimum wage market of programming websites for other Small Businesses, then where can I go to grab the big bucks?
Creating our own products of interest to a market and getting funding.
Recently I was on a stand at the Thames Gateway Forum (ExCel centre), and competing with Gordon Brown and Ken Livingston's speeches to get my presentation across. I got loads of interest. I used to attend early morning BMI meetings and have a coffee and see how many business cards I can pass out in an hour. I hear of stories in these circles of other people in my position who secured x.x million pounds from some organisation to build something that I can do for a quarter of the price (which I have already proved by taking the audio visual system from Portcullis house, and rewriting it for a fraction of the cost for the Houses of Parliament).
How does anybody else ramp up their business to keep getting those large clients?

I see two answers, either we have to bite the bullet and employ a salesman. I know, last time I said I didn't want to go down that route, but I am now starting to see they do have a value to a team, in that they get right to the person holding the purse strings, and evaluate how much they can charge usually quite successfully. Then we can target the bigger businesses that have money to spend. Secondly we produce a product ourselves and resell it. Now that is a hard one. We have a few ideas that I have mentioned in previous blogs like the Wiimote for PC applications, and more recently we chased the idea of a Virtual Reality cricket trainer, but after research saw that we were a couple of years too late with that idea. :)

I believe we are a lot more technical than just a company that bangs out standard website templates, and we now need to consciously move away from that reputation and plant ourselves firmly in the market that can engineer full systems. We have come close to some of these dream jobs, like once I almost got to travel to Spain to kit out a posh yacht with full on automation. Once again I am wondering if we might be losing out on this slice of the cake due to underpricing ourselves which in turn undersells our skills.
I am not a cold caller, so am at present trying a bit of networking on UK forums to see what might come of it, but if any of you successful entrepreneurs out there want to give me some advice then please leave a comment.


Anyway, rant / findings over for now.

Lets try a little marketing and see what I can drum up.

Cheers for reading,

Lindsay.