Care to show us some samples and let your audience be the judge if you’ve been designing or have been merely ‘decorating’ for the last 15 years?

Thanks Ben, best advice ever. I have been practising this (by way of partnering) for some time and step-by-step my business has moved to a new level. Not been easy but the process has ensured better clients with realistic and more manageable expectations.

Who are the people that care if your design is cute:
1. You
2. Your Client (until they’re educated)
3. Other web designers (who are a dying breed anyway)

Get’s you thinking who you’re really designing for.

On another not let’s not dismiss the design completely. The first thing people see before they buy something is the packaging. It still has to appeal to the audience.

Web Design is also dead because everyone is starting to do it. The market is flooded. They either think it’s easy to do or it’s a get rich quick game. Templates are flooding the internet now a days. Soon I feel you’re going to have to justify why people should use and spend and money at all on custom designs.

What Ben’s saying definitely needs to be spread and average users really need to be educated in what our industry is really about.

My experience has shown that it’s only the website owners who get hung up on the way their site looks. Sure, web designers care too, but that’s because they’re trying to please the client.

Clients often have absolutely no idea of why they even want a website, other than it’s because there’s pressure on them to get one. And because they often think that a website needs to impress people, they then associate it with a brochure.

But here we are, more than a decade later into web design, and nowadays just having a “pretty” website won’t cut it. People don’t care about your website unless it can solve their problems.

But I’ve seen too many business websites which look “pretty”, or even “awesome” (terribly abused adjective), the fact is that many of them just don’t work.

And they don’t work because they don’t solve people’s problems.

The key revelation I’d had drummed into me by a previous boss was measurement. “If you can’t measure it then don’t do it” was his maxim. At the time I thought it was a bit old school, but the longer I work for myself the more I realise the validity of it.

‘Looking nice’ on its own is no good to anyone. What clients need is performance figures (measuring whatever is important to them) with trends that justify their investment & hence the designer’s time. All else is vanity!

The fact that clients don’t univerally ask for this today will change as awareness spreads that there has to be a better way. And a recession focuses minds on the bottom line like nothing else, of course.

Roll on the revolution

As a matter of interest, and expanding on Doug’s comment, do you have (or plan) any books for web designers who want to learn more about selling themselves. Most of my design friends (including myself) have no problem with design, but as freelancers, we don’t know how to win clients or effectively market ourselves.

I shall probably be investing in one of your other books anyway.