Word-of-mouth marketing is one of the best ways to get new business — and high-quality business at that. But unless you’re focused on a very small space where everyone knows each other, it can be hard to get your clients to refer you to others on their own. That’s why you need to be willing to ask clients for testimonials and online reviews. Look, consumers are smart. They know that anyone can build a website for their business and claim that...

How long ago did you start your design business or side gig? Three months? Three years? And how long has it been since you evaluated your business since then? As a web designer, your job is to think critically and creatively for your clients, which is why you ask them probing questions like: How old is your business? What’s its mission? Who’s your target audience? What’s the personality of your brand? Where do you see your business in five...

It’s no surprise that some businesses are convinced that all they need is a Facebook page and some awesome paid posts in order to go viral. I get it. It’s relatively cheap. It’s easy. And they see it as a faster way to success than taking the time to build a website, grow an audience organically, and wait. But social media virality is hard to come by and, when it does happen, can be short-lived. Now, making a website or blog go viral? That can have...

Design work is very time consuming. But it’s not just the labor you put into building websites that takes time and concentration. Because the projects you work on typically have a short shelf life, you’re constantly having to find new gigs, woo potential clients, and sign them onto your service — which is like another job in and of itself. So, when do you find time to look for more work when you're so busy actually doing it? You could set aside...

As you draw closer to the finish line with a website, does your client see it just as clearly as you do? Or are they still wavering on design and copy choices even while you’re in the final stages of QA, or talking about additional features they’ll want to add to the site “some day”? Unless you are getting paid — and paid well — for every single hour you put into a website, you have to be willing to enforce a final stopping point. If you don’t,...

You’ve done the hard work: you’ve taken a lead and turned them into a paying customer. Congrats! Now, you have to build their website. But is it that simple? The client signs the contract and you immediately get to work on designing the website? You could certainly approach the kickoff of a web design project that way. However, you’d be missing out on the huge benefits of having a well-laid-out onboarding process. By the time you have a signed...

It’s becoming easier to design websites, what with Wix, Squarespace, and even now WordPress providing DIY site builder tools. On the flipside of that, it’s becoming increasingly more difficult to convince even the least technically-savvy business owner that they shouldn’t try to build their own website. Sadly, the rise of the site builder isn’t the only excuse prospects have for not wanting to work with web designers. In this post,...

There are so many decisions you have to make as a web designer and it can sometimes be a tricky balance trying to put all the right elements into place. When you add the ecommerce piece, it gets even more complicated. According to this infographic by Subscriptionly.net, consumers have very high expectations for ecommerce websites. But if you design it right, there’s a lot of up money up for grabs: We’re talking trillions of dollars in sales...

Take a close look at Monetate’s Ecommerce Quarterly Report for Q2 2018 and you might not be happy about the state of mobile websites it depicts. The good news is that smartphones drive significantly more traffic to websites than all other devices with 52.73%: But conversions? Ehhhh… Smartphone conversions lag behind all other devices with 2.03%. It’s not just conversion rates that are low either. There are also fewer pages looked at,...

It’s the first day of Spring! As you look to clean up other parts of your life (e.g. your home, your refrigerator, your yard) make the cleanup of your web design business a priority as well. If you’re anything like me, you set aside time later in the week or month, promising yourself that you’ll finally take care of “business stuff”. And if you’re also like me, you often have to postpone those business maintenance tasks because new...

As a UX writer, it’s my job to know how to create web copy that convinces readers to take action. That said, it doesn’t matter how engaging of a story I craft for my clients’ web pages or blog posts. If what I’ve written looks terrible on the page, no one will bother to read it. Here’s the problem though: UX writers are not designers. No matter how many short sentences we write to succinctly communicate a point or jargon-free copy we craft...

Social media is an interesting thing. As web design professionals, it can be a great opportunity to share your work and get in front of prospects who might otherwise never find you online. But for as much good as social media can do to propel your marketing efforts, it has the potential to be just as harmful to your business. Social Media Mistakes That Can Harm Your Web Design Business CareerBuilder surveyed over 1,000 people involved in the hiring...

Contact forms are a necessity for websites. Without them, your clients would be relegated to handling website- or business-related matters over the phone or email. Worse, they’d have absolutely no context for the call or message, which would increase the amount of time they’d have to spend responding to it. Contact forms, instead, gather essential details from visitors so that your clients can go into each conversation better prepared....

I recently began reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and have been blown away by what I’ve learned so far. Regardless of what your ultimate career goal is—to actively build websites for clients or to turn your business into a thriving digital agency—there are ways in which you can work less and accomplish more. I’m about halfway through the book and I’ve already shaved an hour off of each workday just by using the tips in the book....