As more and more companies realize the importance of having a website to represent their brand, we observe a growing demand for web designers and web design businesses. When a company or individual is building a website, they prefer to save time by designating creating its design to someone else. It is quite overwhelming for business owners to develop anything from scratch on their own. That’s why they like to allocate developing a suitable design for their website to someone else.
Previously, there were freelance web designers who used to do this job. Gradually, as entrepreneurs realized this opportunity, they started opening web designing businesses. Now you can easily outsource creating your website design to a web designing enterprise.
Starting a web design business is not so difficult. If you have some designing skills, a little know-how of web development, and a passion for illustrations and vector art, you can be the right person to start a web design business.
Let’s go through some factors that you need to consider and keep in mind before starting a web design company.
How to Start a Web Design Business
You can consider 2021 as an ideal time to start a web design business. If you follow the steps described below, you can start making money from a web design business as the world goes through the pandemic and constantly changing lockdown policies. This is a business that can easily be conducted from the comfort of your home, and send clients your way relatively easily in this kind of time because nearly all the businesses in the world are striving to build an online presence for their brand these days.
10 Steps for Starting a Web Design Business
1. Choose Your Web Design Business Niche
Selecting the niche is crucial before starting any kind of business. A niche is primarily the specific area of an industry that you’ll be focusing on. It defines the audience you’ll target to sell your services to, and the problems or situations that your ideal customers face you can offer solutions for.
For a web design business, your niche market will be the businesses you’ll be targeting who are looking to build a website.
- Is it an individual who wants to start his own blog?
- Is it a service-providing firm that wants to showcase its services online?
- Is it a manufacturing firm that wants to provide its product details on a site?
- Is it a small company that wants to build a landing page to promote its latest sales offer?
- Is it a company selling consumer products that want to build an online store?
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
The benefit of having a well-defined niche is that it makes it easier for you to filter out the most profitable leads among the thousands of people you would contact for promoting your web design business. It is better to be an expert in one specific area than to be moderately skilled in multiple areas.
When you put your focus into one particular niche, you can continue to practice and polish your website designing business skills within that niche. This will allow you to satisfy each one of your clients, which will help you build an excellent reputation and brand image. Once you build a sustainable client base, you can choose to alter or expand your niche to grow your business further.
2. Select the Design Services to Offer
There are many kinds of web design services you can offer to your clients. Before you start a web design business, you need to specify what packages you will offer, and what you will include and exclude in each package.
For instance, your web design business might offer domain registration, web hosting, web development, and website optimization for search engines, along with the basic service of building the website design. This will make it into a complete website development package, and you’ll need to hire developers and programmers to do the job for you.
If you want to keep things simple, however, you would only create website templates that you will show to your clients as options for their website design. Here, you would only need a couple of individuals who are good at drawings, illustrations, photo-editing tools, and photography. Include logo designing in this kind of package as well.
Image taken from Strikingly
3. Set Your Company’s Objectives and Goals
The next step is to decide on the goals and objectives of your business. You need to ask yourself the following questions.
- What are your company’s mission and vision?
- What’s your marketing plan to get your very first client?
- How many clients do you target to achieve within your first year of web design business?
- How much revenue do you target to generate within the first quarter?
- How much budget do you plan to spend on your marketing efforts?
- How do you want to position your brand and business?
- Where do you see your web design business 5 years from now?
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
4. Set Your Prices
Before you set your rates, it is important that you conduct a competitor analysis. Your prices need to be both competitive and reasonable. When you are just starting a web design company, you cannot start charging top rates from your first few clients right away. You need to give your target audience an incentive to work with you, instead of working with the bigger web design firms that have been operating in this business for years.
Think wisely and come up with viable pricing packages. Don’t forget to include a free package as well, which gives your clients the opportunity to try out part of your most basic services paying no price. This will help in spreading the word out about your web design business, especially if you provide good quality service even in your free plan.
As you grow in your business and revenue, you can slowly start charging relatively higher rates for your services. You can then use the extra revenue in expanding your business infrastructure or hiring more skilled staff to work for you.
5. Give a Name to Your Web Design Business
Now is the time to come up with an appealing yet suitable name for your web design business. Think of a slogan to go together as well. Your slogan will be what gives your audience the very first impression of your brand. Keep it simple, precise, relevant, and clear. Don’t use too much jargon. Let anyone reading it be able to understand what your business is about and what services you offer.
A good business name has the following qualities.
- It applies to the services you offer.
- It is easy to remember.
- It has an element of slight curiosity in it.
- It is not too location-specific.
- It has an available domain name for it.
6. Set Up Your Legal Stuff
This step is tricky because it depends on the company or enterprise you decide to build, and the location or country you plan to run your web design business from. For instance, if you are in the United States, you might have to deal with one or more of these things:
- Having to pay for a business license and any other associated fees;
- Registering with the tax department and filing state/local taxes;
- Securing the relevant business insurances;
- Planning a business contract.
To make this step easy for you, it is recommended that you visit the local government website and check out all their legal compliance requirements before registering or starting a web design company. It will probably not be necessary to hire an attorney for making sure you are in complete legal compliance with the regulations, but consider getting liability insurance, depending on the rates you plan to charge for your services and the type of clients you plan to work with.
7. Build Your Brand Website
Finally, it is time to build your brand website. This website will serve as a platform to showcase your services and attract clients to your web design business through the website content you will add to it. Since you are selling web design services, the design of your own website should be really outstanding. In short, your website design should have the following characteristics.
- User-friendly
- Easy to navigate
- Responsive
- Feature-rich
- Appealing and good to look at
- Using a contrasting color theme,
- Relevant to your logo design and brand theme
If you choose to build your brand website in Strikingly, you can select from tons of our ready-made website templates to save the time and cost involved in launching your website. Our templates are both appealing and feature-rich. Our drag-and-drop feature particularly saves time for all our users inputting the web content’s key elements in place. You don’t need to hire a web developer to build a website in Strikingly. You can simply do it yourself and get your site up and running in just a couple of hours.
8. Create Customer Support Mechanisms on Your Site
The key to success for any business is to provide good customer service. The same goes for your web design business. You can create one or more of these customer support mechanisms on your site.
- Provide an email address where your customers can write to you for making any non-urgent but detailed inquiry.
- Install live chat onto your site where users can ask you questions and get responses from your support team on the spot.
- Build a contact form for anyone with a query to get in touch with you.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
9. Optimize Your Site For SEO
In order to get traffic onto your web design business website, it is important to optimize your website for search engines. Keep track of your website analytics regularly. Use content marketing to get people from different websites and blogs to hop on to your site.
10. Get Your First Few Clients
Now that your online presence has been well established, you need to start your marketing campaigns to get your first few clients. You can use social media marketing to attract followers and start signing deals with those who get in touch. Remember, there is a lot of potential and demand in the web design business nowadays. If you cannot get good clients within the first month, don’t give up. Continue with your marketing efforts and you will surely land a few good clients to get your web design business off the ground.
Now that you know how to start a web design business, try to cash on this opportunity before the demand for this field drops. While the world is still coping with the global pandemic, businesses are on the lookout for services that will help them run their businesses from home. And having a website with a great web design is absolutely crucial for running a business, or making money from home.
If you would like to save time in building a website for your web design business, go with Strikingly. Sign up for a free account with us. Ask us anything via our 24/7 live chat support, in case you face any issues in creating and launching your website with us. We love to see our users’ businesses thrive and are always there to help with any technical issues you might face during the process.
