Prior to starting Sunshine Tech and Media, I operated a sole proprietorship specializing in website design. As such, I figured that it may be beneficial to share my experiences in formulating a successful web design business.
Luckily, the web design market is far less saturated than the web hosting industry, so the process for starting a web design business is – by extension – quite easier than starting a web hosting business.
Step 1: Determine Your Skillset
Determining your skillset is arguably the most crucial foundation to set in order to start a successful web design business. There are both broad and specific topics which this step encompasses. For example, some are good in web design, whilst others perform better in web development (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.). On a more specific level, some may perform well in creating HTML static websites, while others may excel in creating dynamic PHP websites, or CMS (WordPress, Drupal, etc.) websites.
Step 2: Set Up Your Business Appearance
Once you have determined your skillset, advertise it. Similar to the web hosting industry, it is important to tell others where you excel, and how you do so. It is also important to carefully design your own website, as this is often a reflection of the ‘design style’ of a web designer.
Step 3: Advertise To No End
Print business cards, buy flyers, leave donuts at your potential customers’ front desks. When starting a web design business, local marketing is oftentimes the most effective advertising method. The reasoning for this boils down to the fact that those who are interested in web design tend to search something along the lines of, “Web Designers Near Me,” or, “Web Designers Orlando, Florida.”
However, it is also important to maintain a global presence on the web. Set up your social media profiles, start a YouTube channel, start a web design blog, all of these help passively raise awareness for your brand.
Step 4: Find Ways To ‘Stay Connected’ With Past Clients
In order to maintain consistent profitability, it is important to maintain a connection with past clients through maintenance plans, web hosting, social media marketing, etc. All of these yield monthly income, and allow your business to cumulatively grow.
Utilizing a hosting solution for web design clients is by far the easiest of these methods, as a client requires web hosting to launch any sort of web presence. There are a few ways to go about this, but we recommend our Cloud Compute solution. We recommend our cloud compute solution for its performance, pricing, and scalability. To expand on this, our cloud compute instances are provably higher performing than many competitors, as is evident in Geekbench scores (which we provide). We are also quite more affordable than many of our competitors, which is further amplified when considering our performance. Finally, a cloud compute instance may be upgraded within minutes simply by contacting support.