Part 3: Tips for Running a Successful Web Design Business
My third piece of advice in the “Tips for Running a Successful Web Design Business” series involves establishing clear deliverables through written contracts with your customers. Deliverables can include design drafts, edits, revisions and completed works, recurring monthly services and the like.
Tip 3: “Get it in Writing”
Every professional designer, web or other, has encountered clients that can’t make up their minds about the details of a specific project or design. Worst case scenarios involve a group of individuals with varying tastes or expectations attempting to come to a unanimous decision at the expense of your time and effort. These attempts typically steer you on a course back to the drawing board.
But heading back to the drawing board isn’t necessarily a bad thing as long as you’re getting paid for it. That’s why it’s imperative that you establish written contracts with your clients that clearly outline the products or services you’ll be delivering at what price.
The simplest way to approach the matter is to offer your customers a time estimate for the project with an hourly rate attached. If you find yourself in a “too many hands stirring the pot” scenario like the one above, you need only remind your clients about the time you’ve spent on the project to date and your hourly rates. If they aren’t concerned about the accruing costs, good for you. If they are concerned, the situation will spur them toward progressive decision making.
Another way to insure that your getting full compensation for your time is to provide your customers with a detailed description of your services and pricing. The keyword here is “detailed”. If you are designing a logo, let your clients know in writing that you will provide so many design drafts and so many revisions for such and such a price. Once you’ve delivered, let your customer know that additional work will require additional compensation.
Part 2: Tips for Running a Successful Web Design Business
My second post in the series, “Tips for Running a Successful Web Design Business” involves marketing your business on the web. This applies to web site design and many other design related businesses.
Tip 2: “Go Local”
The Internet has been supersaturated with sites offering web design and web site related services. For your web design business to be discovered on the web, you need to target a specific audience. The easiest way to do this is to focus on your geographic area. There may be a million web site design companies offering their services to the world, but only a couple dozen in your city or region.
By including your business location in your Internet marketing efforts, your web site is much more likely to appear in search engines’ first 3 results pages when users are looking for local web design companies. It’s the general consensus among the search engine marketing community that if your site doesn’t appear in the first 3 pages, it might as well not show up at all.
And with so many businesses to choose from online, design or other, Internet users are looking for ways to narrow their choices. When consumers aren’t sure who to trust, they turn to local businesses. Part of the reason is a feeling of community and familiarity. Another is that they know where to find you if you mess up! But don’t let this intimidate you. Instead, use it to your advantage by assuring your customers that you stand behind your work and your local community.
Part 1: Tips for Running a Successful Web Design Business
It’s been brought to my attention that designers, web or other, are great at designing but not necessarily skilled at promoting or running a design business. In response, I’ve decided to publish a series of tips for running a successful web design business over the next several weeks.
I hope these tips will help new entrepenuers in the field of web design and in other design fields to get their businesses up and running and successful in a reasonable amount of time.
Tip 1: “Outsource”
The first step to running a successful web design business is understanding that, even if you “can” do it all, you shouldn’t. Spending your valuable design time working on bookkeeping, direct sales or computer hardware maintenance will inevitably slow the growth of your business and send you to an early grave.
If you’re serious about your new business, my recommendation is that you hire an accountant to handle your books and sign up for a web hosting reseller account rather than attempt to build and maintain your own web servers. I’ll touch on the sales aspect later. Outsourcing these chores will free up your time for doing what you do best, designing web sites, and will ultimately lead to a better product, happier customers and more business.
Check back next week for Part 2 in the series with my second tip for running a successful web design business.
Examples of Holiday Web Design
As a follow up to my last article, “Web Design for the Holidays”, I thought I’d show you some examples of holiday web design. The most famous example would undoubtedly be Google, which designs a different logo for its homepage for just about every holiday on the calendar.
Although the practice of altering a company logo is generally inadvisable from a branding standpoint, Google’s worldwide fame affords its creative department a lot of leeway.
Here are some examples of web sites that change their images and backgrounds for the holiday season but leave their logos “as is”.
Target
Amazon.com
eBay
SiteForce
Need I say more? Well, yes… one more thing. The links above are “date sensitive” so don’t read this article in June and go looking for winter holiday homepages.
Season’s Greetings!
