How To Start A Web Design Business
If you are looking to start a business this year, you should consider starting a web design business. Now is as good a time as ever to go into the web design business.
Almost every business, association, organization, public personality and more need and want a website. This can be a great opportunity for you if you decide to start a web design business, and doing so has never been easier.
This article will lay out how to start a web business this year as well give you a few tips to help you along the way.
Pick A Niche For You To Focus On
It is a good idea to pick a niche when you are in the early stages of starting your website design business. This will help you focus on less things and help you make better use of your time, energy and money.
Picking a niche can help you narrow down what skill sets you should focus on. Doing this will help you know what graphic design skills you should learn and improve upon. You will want to have a wide range of skills, but not all of them will be equally important. You may even be able to outsource some of them.
Picking a niche will also let you have more time to think about other aspects of your website design business, such as how you are going to get clients, what web design software you are going to need and use, what business software you will go with (for example, accounting software) and more.
You are going to want to focus your energy and time on only a few things at first, and can broaden your scope later and even hire others to help you.
Learning Web And Graphic Design
You will most likely want to learn how to build and design websites as well as how to create graphics for those websites and how to edit pictures. Learning these skills is relatively easy, but can take some time to learn and get good at.
You can take one of two routes when learning how to create and design websites. One method is to hand code your websites. This involves learning HTML, CSS, Javascript and most likely some backend programming language to handle the data. Going this route can be very time consuming and difficult.
Luckily learning web design can be free, assuming that you have a computer or laptop and an internet connection. Probably the best way to get started is by watching video tutorials of whatever graphic design skill you want to learn. You can go to school, such as college or university to learn web design, or you can take a “boot camp”, but those are paid options and can be expensive.
Resources like YouTube, Udemy and others offer great free and paid courses for you to learn web design. This along with the use of search engines like Google and Brave give you many resources to learn web design.
Choose A Name For Your Design Business
This step shouldn’t take too long, but you should put some thought into it. There are a few things that you might want to consider before choosing the name for your web design business.
One of the things that you will want to think about is whether you might want to have the option to sell your web design business at a later date. You can include your name in your business’s name, but it will probably make it harder to sell it later.
Another thing to consider is whether you can get the domain name or a similar one to that of your business’s name. For example, if you want to name your business “Dallas Texas Website Design”, is that or a similar domain name available.
You will also want your business’s name to be easy to spell and remember, as a general rule of thumb.
Choosing The Right Tools
There are a lot of options of software programs that will let you create and design websites, as well as create and edit graphics and photos.
You will probably want to use a website builder to create and design your websites, instead of hand coding them. Most websites can be built using a website builder, and it is almost always much cheaper and easier to do so this way.
Most website builders are basically drag and drop editors that let you move web page elements around however you like.
Some examples of these website builders are WordPress’ Elementor, WebFlow, Duda and other great options.
You will also need to learn how to create different types of graphics for the websites that you build as well as for other platforms, for example, social media platforms. You are also going to need to create graphics that you will place on your website and social media platforms also.
To create these different types of graphics, you will need different types of graphic design software. Sometimes you will also need to edit photos. There are a lot of graphic design software that let you create different graphics.
Some of the graphic design software used to create graphics is free, but most of the best options are paid.
You will also want to have other software that let’s you easily run your web design business, for example, accounting software. The right accounting software will let you automate most of the tasks related to billing and payments and other related tasks such as calculating taxes.
There are other software programs that you might find helpful as you progress, such as prototyping and wireframing software.
Getting Clients
One of the most important things when first starting your web design business is getting your first clients. This can be a lot of work at first.
Some of the more traditional ways to do this is to have business cards made and to distribute to people that you think might be potential clients and locations where you think that potential clients might be. Depending on the niche, this can include leaving your business cards at people’s homes, at their office, at places such as coffee shops or other similar locations.
Another way is to approach potential clients in person. If your business niche will be contractors, you can approach contractors and say that you offer web design services and give them a business card or your business’s phone number.
The best clients are those that are either return customers or are referred by current or former customers.
Conclusion
Web designers will need to get web hosting for their clients. A great place to get cheap month to month website hosting is websitehostingcouponcodes.com.
Hopefully, you will be one of the many successes of people that started and succeeded in starting a web design business.