At the beginning of the year I wrote a post about thinking of your web design service as a product. In that case I was talking mostly about how this approach makes pricing your service easier. That’s all true, but I think I stumbled upon another benefit: it’s a lot easier to sell.
I recently started a new blog, Make Your Web Site Count, that targets small business owners with web sites. The focus of the posts are helping non-technical people get the most out of their web sites. Sometimes I do that by discussing features they could add to their site. Sometimes I talk about strategies to get more traffic to their web site. In some instances I just post a case study of a project that I’ve recently worked on to help give business owners an idea of what is possible for their sites.
Now the writing style is definitely targeted towards an audience that doesn’t have a lot of experience with the web, but the material covered includes lots of little gems you could share with your own clients.
You have a lot of information locked up in your skull. Think about it. How often do you come across a web site and think to yourself the person in charge of this could make it 500% better if they just made a few simple changes? That’s unique information that you have and they don’t. It’s valuable. You should give it to them for free.
When I was first starting this company, I wasn’t really sure what I was doing. I had the technical chops to build web sites, but I didn’t know much about running a business. Sales? Budgeting? I was just proud that I had completed the paperwork so that the state of Indiana recognized me as a business.
As a web developer you have the necessary set of skills to create HTML email formats. I was never that crazy about them because creating a design that will be effective in all major email clients is even more taxing than creating one for the major web browsers. You really have to keep the styling pretty vanilla.
Why does anybody offer online payments? After all, there is a mark-up that takes money out of your pocket on every transaction. Unless it’s the only way you accept payments (which is true for some businesses), you’re complicating your accounting and business processes by adding another special case for how a payment is received.
One of the most difficult and valuable things to create on a web site is original content that is regularly updated. You can design a stylized layout that will draw visitors in, but if there isn’t relevant content that is regularly updated, visitors aren’t going to stay long. Yet most business owners did not start their business with the intent of becoming web authors. So most are resistant to the idea of committing to the ongoing task of creating content for the site. After all, how are they supposed to find time for that in the midst of running a business?
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed I was running low on business cards. When I first started my business, I threw together a simple card design and went with the cheapest printer I could find on the Internet. (VistaPrint is what I found, if you’re curious.) My business has grown quite a bit since I started out of the gates. I felt like now was the time to consider a higher quality printing job.
I ended up working with a local company. (Rowland Printing, again for the curious.) The experience was totally different. With VistaPrint I had to do most of the legwork. I followed their instructions on formatting my design to meet their specifications. I spent far too long doing minor tweaks that probably would have taken a professional a few minutes. With Rowland on the other hand, I sent them a file that had my design. They sent me back a file that had been formatted appropriately and asked if that’s what I meant.
The whole experience was delightful for me as the customer. Now VistaPrint offers a very good service at what seems to me to be a good price, but I’ll be working with my local company in the future. I’m willing to pay more money because it required so little effort on my part to get the result that I wanted. If you wish you were making more money, a good question to ask yourself might be, “How easy am I to work with?”
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