If you’re a web designer please do not take any offence at what I’m about to say but your business model is about to get broken.
Don’t get me wrong, great web designers will always find and do great, creative and useful work. I’m talking about the guys and girls in the middle of the pack (or even moreso the bottom). The designers doing simple web design work for small businesses but not really bringing anything new to the table.
What’s Wrong with the Status Quo
For more than a decade, local web design companies have been able to make a decent crust by developing simple websites for other local businesses. But things have changed and the problems with this model are becoming aparent.
(1) Sites like WordPress and SquareSpace have put getting a website up and running within the grasp of anyone who can use a computer. Worse (or better) still, given the amount of development time that has gone into these platforms, the resulting websites are frequently more robust and offer more features than sites being produced by many web design firms.
(2) At the same time, the focus has moved from ‘website’ to ‘web presence’ with an increasing number of small businesses and professionals using sites like Facebook and LinkedIn in lieu of stand alone websites. Similarly, many small retailers are turning to marketplaces like Amazon and Etsy to run their businesses.
(3) And finally, outsourcing web design to the lowest bidder has become easier than ever, pushing down prices.
Of course, middle-of-the-road web designers will still pick up jobs BUT, and it’s a big but, it’s going to become increasingly hard to charge thousands for a simple website design – which means an awful lot of designers are going to have to start getting creative with their businesses.
So what are the options?
Personally, I see a few ways for web designers to go:
- Move upmarket by delivering top notch design skills and custom development. There will always be business at the top of the pile for high-quality designers and developers that create great work and command solid prices. This means building a kick-ass reputation and enviable portfolio – good won’t be good enough.
- Migrate to new platforms by focusing your efforts on things like mobile application development, apps for social media sites or even the forthcoming iPad. These markets are undoubtedly smaller but there are also fewer players and ‘do-it-yourself’ solutions aren’t yet up to scratch.
- Go with the flow by working with WordPress or SquareSpace or whatever, carving out a niche as someone who can turn indentikit looking sites into unique designs or by adding value to popular platforms. You could also consider ways to use these platforms to rework how you deliver projects to your existing client base.
- Go niche by focusing on the needs of one particular industry and providing sites that suit their specific requirements down to the ground.
This last two ideas in particular would seem to be straightforward options for taking an existing web design business in a new direction.
A quick Google for ‘wordpress designers’ will give you a feel for how some smart developers are carving out reputations within this niche. Along the same lines there has been an enormous proliferation of developers creating top notch WordPress themes, Brian Gardner from StudioPress and Chris Pearson with Thesis being two great examples.
Industry-focussed offerings are a slightly different kettle of fish. In reality they’re not really selling web design but rather a solution in a box.
Businesses like Small Farm Central (farms), eBandLive (indie bands) and BigCartel (niche online retail) all serve one distinct marketplace and have crafted their offerings to appeal to that customer type.
Their revenue models can range from monthly subscription plans to freemium options to simple fee-based development – but they all benefit from being seen as experts in their niches and building impressive, and highly relevant, portfolios.
Some companies are even mixing industry-specific web design into other business models. Irish property portal PropertyPal.com for example, generates a significant portion of their revenues by selling clean, function-filled web design to realtors who list with them (fully integrated with the PropertyPal site of course).
What Do You Think?
Needless to say, there are probably a lot of web designers out there who will disagree with me. My point is not that web design isn’t a valuable service but rather that as technology advances new business models are needed.
The same could be true of just about any other industry you can mention – especially when those new technologies make it easy for consumers to do for themselves what once required expert help.
What do you think?
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