Design Your Website to Sell While You Work

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 time on the weekends to work on drumming up new projects, but that’s the last thing you want to do. Imagine spending that time booking new business and then being too burned out to get started with any of them? That’s no good.

You could, of course, do it during the workweek. It would just require you to dedicate otherwise billable hours to non-billable work and cut into your business’s profitability.

Without hiring someone to handle sales for you, what’s the solution?

It’s your website.

Here are some things you can do to design a website that relieves you of at least some of the burden of finding and selling to new clients.

1. Design for Your Niche

One of the best things you can do as a web designer (or any creative freelancer, really) is to carve out a highly specific niche. For instance, you could design websites for:

  • Real estate agents
  • Female-owned businesses
  • Restaurants in your city

The more targeted your audience, the easier it will be to sell to them (and to build their websites).

I’m going to take this one step further as I don’t just think it’s enough to choose a niche to design for.

I think your own website should be reflective of your niche. More specifically, it should be designed to look like a website your client would want as their own. What better way to sell a prospect on a website than to show them that you know exactly how to build the solution they need?

The Modern Firm is an excellent example of this:

Visit the website and you’ll notice:

  • The company name sounds like it should be working for law firms.
  • The design is super buttoned-up — traditionally-structured, muted color palette, and minimalism at its best.
  • Copy is professional, honest, and straight to the point.

In other words, this website looks and sounds like one that its target clientele would want for themselves.

2. Answer Their Questions

Think about how much time you spend dealing with objections as you talk to prospective clients. That’s either because their expectations haven’t been set properly before meeting with you or they’re a bad fit.

If you use your website to answer those questions, though, you can significantly decrease the amount of time you spend on sales calls with prospects.

One way to do this is to explain in the simplest terms what your clients get. Here’s how I handle this for prospective copywriting clients:

I was frustrated that I had to explain over and over again to prospects what it meant to create optimized content. The question continued to come up on calls, so I decided to just provide the answer on my website.

I now no longer get questions about my services. Prospects hop on the phone with me and ask how much they have to pay to get started. It’s been a huge time-saver.

As a web designer, it might not be as simple as to say, “You’ll get a 10-page website, built using X theme, optimized for speed with caching, etc.” When it comes to websites, you’re just delivering too technical of a product.

So, for you, I’d suggest taking the same basic principle of “answer their questions”, but tackle them with an FAQs like Eternity does:

They’ve done such a great job of providing simple and straightforward answers to the kinds of questions I’m sure all of you get. Not only will this decrease the amount of time people have to spend with them on sales calls, but it’ll help weed out bad-fit clients.

3. Create a More Impressive Portfolio

There’s absolutely no question that your website needs to include an awesome portfolio of websites. Just make sure that any samples you include in your portfolio:

  • Are 100% something you’re proud to show off;
  • Are relevant to your target audience;
  • Are consistently designed.

Here’s what I mean:

Bluetext is in the business of creating digital campaigns (including web design) for clients. Although they build solutions for a couple dozen industries, they keep their portfolio well-organized, grouping sample work based on category.

For example, this is what their “Cybersecurity” portfolio looks like:

Notice how well put together this portfolio is — everything is clearly labeled, designed in a similar style, and is impressive to look at. It also helps clients in quickly see the potential for their specific business without the distraction of other types of websites getting in the way.

4. Establish Trust

As a web designer, you have to build trust with clients if you want them to pay top-dollar for your services. While you can certainly do that throughout the web design process, why wait? Use your website as a vehicle for establishing trust now.

One way to do this is with your portfolio.

Another way to do this is by including testimonials or, at the very least, logos from clients who are happy to connect their brand to yours. Interactive Strategies uses a dedicated banner on its home page to show off brands who’ve trusted them:

If you don’t have a client base with recognizable names, or you’re still working to amass an impressive list of clients, don’t worry. You can use other trust marks to establish trust now as Direction.com does:

Prospective clients can see all of their awards and certifications in one place — and it’s definitely something to marvel at.

5. Simplify Next Steps

If you’ve been doing this for long enough, I bet you can anticipate what prospective clients’ next steps are after they’ve visited your website.

For my business, I know that they’ll see my site and then reach out for pricing. However, I know that I can’t actually answer that question during a first phone call. I have to review their needs, business, industry, and a whole host of other details before I can provide a quote.

So, I give them two options:

There’s just one caveat to the phone call though. I don’t get on the phone with anyone until they fill out my questionnaire (which their “Thank You” email sends to them). It asks them everything I need to know to provide them with a quote.

That way, when I do get on the phone, I’m fully prepared to talk about my process, explain final questions, and give them a number.

I would suggest building out a similar set of contact options (e.g. contact form and scheduler, chatbot and scheduler, chatbot and email, etc.), so you can spend less time going back-and-forth on the phone or over email and instead get them a quote and contract right away.

Design Your Website to Sell While You Work

Would you like to stop spending so much time on job boards, social media, and in search trying to find new clients? You already know how to build websites to help your clients sell their businesses, so why aren’t you doing the same for your own?

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Design Your Website to Sell While You Work published first on https://medium.com/@koresol

5 Signs That Web Design Is Reaching Its Own Industrial Age

The Internet as a concept, and as a community, is much like a teenager: it’s struggling to establish its identity, everyone is trying to tell it what to do, and it tends to lash out at both people who deserve it as well as those who don’t. It does so at random, and you’re not its real dad, anyway.

The practice of designing websites, however, has gone right past the teenage years and blown past the whole human-life-span metaphor entirely. Web design is, in my opinion, reaching an industrial age, of sorts. You know, the era of smokestacks and Charles Dickens’ really depressing novels.

Let’s see how:

Increased DIY Capability

The sewing machine was invented in 1755, about five years before the “official beginning” of the industrial age. This machine, and others like it, heralded the beginning of that age and the massive machines that would come after, but they also drastically expanded the production capabilities of individuals working at home, or in their place of business.

It started with software like FrontPage and Dreamweaver, and now we’ve got Squarespace, Wix, Weebly, Duda, Webflow, and a host of other options. They’re all designed to enhance the output of the individual, the hobbyist, the business owner, and the freelancing professional. Work that once might have taken a very long time for one person, or a reasonable amount of time for ten people, is all being done by one person, in a lot less time.

And if you’re a purist, you can always sew the buttons onto your web page by hand.

Increased Automation At The Professional-Level

Think of the massive looms in old factories. Now it’s not particularly easy to automate creative visual work, as such. Most of the automation in web design is done at the coding stage, in both front and back end. But even with such simple tools as Symbols in Sketch or Affinity Designer can drastically reduce the work required to produce a large number of designs.

Or at least something like a large number of buttons. It’s not a perfect analogy to the factories of old, but the tools we have are making it consistently easier to produce designs of consistent quality, even if they also have pretty uh… “consistent” layouts and aesthetic styles. This sort of drastically increased output is the very definition of industry.

Expansion Of The Digital Middle Class

Increased DIY capability and automation in the industrial age led to a dramatic expansion in what people could afford. The increased amount of work in general meant that more people could afford that stuff, and thus, the middle class was born.

The same thing is happening in web design. For the hobbyist or professional building sites on the cheap, shared hosting can cost as little as a few dollars a month, and code editors are free. For less code-focused hobbyists and business owners alike, code-free website builders are attractive and largely affordable options, too. Plenty of platforms offer a straight-up free plan.

Getting a web presence of some kind has literally never been easier, and it’s going to keep getting easier.

Outsourcing And Subcontracting

Then, of course, there’s outsourcing and sub-contracting. These come in two major forms: software as a service, and labor. SaaS in particular has become exceedingly popular as a way to build a product that constantly pays for itself, leaving you to focus on maintenance, and improvements. The train engineers of old wish they could have worked on their trains while they were still running.

While few websites are, I think, built by orphans trapped in smoke-filled factories, we should not ignore the fact that there is a lot of cheap labor out there. And you know what? A lot of them are actually really good, and are only cheap because of the economic disparity between nations. This actually leads me to my next point…

Poor Enforcement Of Industry Standards

One of the downsides of industrial ages as they happen all over the world is this: the constant push for progress sometimes leaves much to be desired in the way we treat our fellow humans. Of course, this isn’t happening to web designers in a bubble. The “gig economy” is often used as an excuse not to provide benefits for employees. Cheap labor is often taken advantage of in the worst ways. Overworking people to near-death is accomplished not with whips, but with Instagram and Twitter feeds praising the eighty-hour work week.

And the actual standards meant to ensure the quality of the product are often ignored. The W3C does a lot of good work, but they don’t actually have the power to enforce HTML validation. Well… that’s probably for the best, all things considered, but as we’ve seen, governments are also poorly equipped to provide QA for the Internet as a whole.

However, I should note that I greatly appreciate some of the government-led work done in the field of accessibility, particularly in countries that require WCAG compliance.

Fear Of Obsolescence

The proliferation of industry created a lot of jobs, and killed a lot of others. Design, however, is still a creative discipline, and thus there will always be room for good designers. Even so, automation and code-free design tools have people worried, and I can understand why. That said, lots of people will actually hire you to use Wix for them, so… shrug.

People outsourcing relatively easy tasks might save us, yet.

It’s Not All Doom And Gloom…

We call hand-crafted websites… well… that. Sometimes “bespoke”. Perhaps a better word would be “artisanal”, and we should just get used to being hipsters. I’m only mostly kidding.

In every industrial age we’ve witnessed, things got bad, and then they got better. We haven’t gotten rid of all the smoke stacks yet, but the world is in most ways a much better place than it was, and the Internet is developing faster than the rest of the world. It may be an industrial age now, but imagine what it will be like when they invent computers.

Wait…

Featured image via Unsplash.

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5 Signs That Web Design Is Reaching Its Own Industrial Age published first on https://medium.com/@koresol