Whether you own a small business, agency, or work alone, the value you provide clients goes well beyond the website you build them. Web designers create a vital tool that allows businesses to grow, reach new clients, expand their services, and establish a strong online presence. Indeed, a successful website requires careful planning, designing, building, testing, and regular maintenance. Let’s take a dive into how web designers can add more value to their work for clients.

1. Keep Learning Web Design

Like any tech profession, web designers must continue to learn and improve their skills. Technology and design practices continue to change every year, so you want to be knowledgeable about these new trends and technologies. This will be important for ensuring that you build modern, relevant websites for your clients. 

If you are self-taught, it’s essential that you not only learn web design best practices, but also the fundamentals of why things are designed in a certain way. Those that go to school for web design learn how to build websites that are accessible and functional by everyone, including those with physical and visual impairments. The more users that can view and use your clients’ sites, the more value you will be delivering to their overall business.

2. Learn UI and UX

While you don’t need to become a UI or UX expert, it is a good idea to learn the basics of user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) principles. By understanding and applying UI and UX into your web design, this will help you add even more value to your clients’ website projects. Specifically, it will improve their online brand messaging, site traffic, and sales.

UI will help you think about how the website looks from an end user perspective. Your important mission is to guide your clients’ site visitors on their site journey. If done well, this first site experience will be positive and lead to site conversions and sales. 

UX will help you think about the user first, rather than the site or client. By addressing the users’ needs first, this will help you build a strong user experience. When users have a positive first site experience, they are more likely to drive site conversions and become customers. 

3. Practice Your Communication Skills

Whether you are a new or master designer, excellent communication skills are vital. You will have discovery meetings with clients via phone, video, or in-person, as well as ongoing status updates via email.

During discovery meetings, it will be your job to take the lead and find out what your client’s site visions and goals are. If you are nervous or uncomfortable with these meetings, it helps to plan an hour in advance. Write down the questions you need to ask and even practice in front of a mirror, pet, or friend. By being prepared, you will be more confident during these meetings and mitigate any wasted time not knowing what to cover. Additionally, by knowing the right questions to ask, you can identify your client’s pain points and provide an expert solution with your web design skills.

4. Focus on Website Strategy

While it may be tempting to dive head first into designing and building a website, it’s important to think about the site strategy first. This is the only way to achieve your clients’ goals and provide lasting value to them. Once you know your clients’ goals, target audience, and brand positioning, you can use this key information to strategize the web design project. 

For every new project, start with creating user personas based on the client’s target audience. This will help you plan out every step of the website with purpose. The next step is to create a wireframe, which is the basic structure of the site. Wireframes help you lay out all of the main elements of the site, which you can reference for designing and building the site. Then, you can create a design mockup – how the site will look visually. This step should always be done before the development phase. There are numerous tools to use, but some popular ones include Figma, XD, and Photoshop.

5. Raise Your Prices to Provide More Client Value 

If you are currently offering your services for very low prices, this makes it hard to provide more value to clients. It would be nice if you could build a high-quality website at lightning speeds, but this is just not possible. By increasing your prices, this will give you the time and resources you need to create stellar websites that will take your clients’ websites to the next level of awesome. While you don’t need to break your clients’ bank, it is important to charge according to the market and how much time you need to create an exceptional tool for their business.

As you can see, web designers never stop learning and perfecting their trade. This is a vibrant industry that offers several opportunities to work with all kinds of clients with different goals and needs. We hope you found these tips helpful as you continue to grow as a designer. If you are interested in joining a fully remote, US-based team of web experts, contact Awesome Website Guys in Wilmington, NC today. We are looking for awesome people that are WordPress experts and awesome project managers. Is that you?