Making Web Design Fun Again

There was a time when I felt burned out. I had built hundreds of websites. Nothing felt new. I kept trying to get clients because I had to make a living. But when leads came in I almost felt disappointed. I didn't want to do the work.

It was such a weird place to be because I really do love web design. I love technology and coding. I love creating. For a long time, I couldn't understand why I felt so downcast over having a “successful” web design business. Then I had a realization that radically changed my life. I was bored.

My web development skills were strong. My workflow was solid. Everything looked great from the outside, but I had reached a plateau and didn't really notice. I was just coasting along and it was boring.

The Spark That Lit The Fire

I had been laser-focused on the technical journey for my clients.

Hosting platforms
DNS/Domain configuration
Optimizing and hardening WordPress
Page load speed and caching
Content delivery networks
Ecommerce and PCI Compiance

But, when I opened my eyes to the customer journey, that was the spark that reignited the fire inside of me. Web design was amazingly fun again!

What Is The Customer Journey?

The customer journey is the path my client's customer takes from first discovering my client's business to becoming a paying customer. The foundation of the customer journey is the technical journey.

You can't drive traffic to a terrible website and expect to get good results. But a great technical foundation by itself isn't enough to generate results either. The customer journey includes discovering the answer to questions like:

Who are my client's best customers?
Where can we find more people matching that persona?
What should my client's offer be?
How do we communicate that offer on their website?
What type of lead magnet would work best for this audience?
How do we nurture their leads?
What is the client onboarding process going to be?

There are technical underpinnings to every one of those points, but “web design” (as I had been doing it) didn't adequately address those questions. I basically just relied on the client to tell me the answers to those questions. But those are hard questions that my clients did not have good answers for.

Solution First

Discovery calls and brainstorming with my clients were not enough to get consistent and effective results. Clients don't want an “adventure” they want results. They don't want to “brainstorm” they want to be told what works.

For me, the only way to know that I could generate the results my clients were counting on me for was to develop and test the solution first – NOT to develop a “custom” solution on the fly.

When you develop the solution first…

Your client gets far better results.
It's a lot easier to find clients.
Your profit margins are much higher.

And it puts the fun back into web design.

If you'd like to talk about how to apply this to your business, let's talk.

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