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Web Designer: Are you the Genuine Article?
So you just bought Dreamweaver or downloaded Joomla and you think you are ready to become the next great Web Designer. Listen, just because you got all the way through the Quick Start Reference Guide, doesn’t mean you should hang out your shingle quite yet, any more than when you bought that expensive camera you suddenly became a great photographer.
As might be expected before you begin charging for your services, there’s a bit more to the business than uploading your first web page, laden though it may be with cool photos and text.
If there’s one thing seasoned web designers dislike, it’s rank amateurs representing themselves as professionals, only to give their industry a black eye. Victims of these masqueraders usually wind up abandoning any plans they may have had for an online marketing strategy, because the experience demonstrated websites do little, if anything, to generate more business.
So before you plant that entrepreneurial stake in the ground and launch your new web design business, you might want to get answers to some questions that run a little deeper than uploading a few cool looking web pages:
Have you developed an approach for learning enough about your clients’ business to create and implement an effective online marketing strategy?
Do you understand the client’s target audience enough to know what resources and practices to apply to the site in order to make it effective?
Have you learned best practices for search engine optimization and content development, so it might have a chance to be found a little sooner than on page twenty of a Google search?
Have you familiarized yourself with some analytical tools for continuous evaluation of your maintenance strategies?
Are you prepared to support your client’s online acceptance of debit and credit cards?
Does your client have a back-end database to be queried for customers or other users of the site? Oops.
Frankly, these are only a few fundamental questions for which you should find answers long before hanging out that shingle and potentially mucking up the industry with more victims. Unfortunately, many small business owners don’t know enough about an effective online marketing strategy to properly evaluate a proposal. That’s not a slam on the owners. It’s just a fact. Most are too busy running their businesses to garner enough expertise for recognizing the genuine article. All the more reason that as a web design guru you should be equipped with knowledge and skills that at a minimum address the aforementioned issues, so you can do a credible job.
Thanks for listening!
Tags: business, website design