I recently read an article (honestly can’t remember the source) that advised new web designers to find a niche and stick with it. My only question was, “why?”
Why would any web designer in their right mind only stick to one niche? There are hundreds of clients, thousands of possibilities, and millions of ideas. Web designers should be ready to take them all on in a heartbeat. I’m not saying it’s bad to have specialities (one of mine is WordPress) but sticking to only one type of site design is foolish and will only lose you business.
It’s true that most of my clients are small businesses. But if a church or photographer wants to come along and hire me; I’m going to instantly adapt to fit their needs. Limiting oneself to a specific niche is like trying to do surgery while wearing a full-body cast. It simply won’t work and you’ll hurt more people than you help in the end. When it comes to web design it’s all or nothing. You either can do A to Z design, or you can’t. Now we all have our limits, but creativity should fill in most of the gaps. After all, web design is an art form, nothing less.
When you consider the idea of a designer sticking to a specific niche; it seems like he/she almost wants to limit himself/herself. Specialising in certain areas always brings a uniqueness to your skillset but you should always have all the bases covered, even if that means hand-coding an entire site or working overtime on a project because you need to learn a new skill. Any web designer who takes a bold step and says “I am a Real Estate web designer.” is going to trip the next step when a client requests a blog, and again with the next client who requests a forum. Before you know it, you’ll be drowning in requests that you have no likelihood of fulfilling.
I’m going to end this by saying: if you have limits or something you don’t like doing (like PHP coding) then acknowledge them, but by no means quit learning. Every second of the day new ways of designing are discovered or invented. Try keeping up with just a small portion of them and you will certainly find success at every turn!
It seems that old practices of business still find their way into the modern world. For example, web design. There is absolutely no reason that a client and designer should ever have to sit down and discuss a site. Whether they both are in the same room or 2000 miles apart, no amount of physical meeting is going to express what the client has built up in his/her head as the design. This is a struggle for web designers to understand the client’s wishes but that is part of the process; getting to know the client. Even clients that I have sat down with have proved to have no more of an impact on the design than ones I’ve never met. As an international and country-wide web design firm; Ink Ignite cannot meet with each and every client.
I have astonishingly been hung up on just because I can’t physically meet with the client (living in the mountains makes it very inconvenient to visit clients, with no guarantee they will even show up or decide to hire me). Not only does that show the client isn’t truly ready to be part of the Internet, it also shows he/she is not ready to receive modern business. After all, the whole point of a website is to meet customers or visitors without any physical interaction, so why can’t that be the point of a designer?
Another reason clients may desire physical meetings is because they’ve been cheated out of money in the past. And so they feel that meeting the designer face-to-face is going to provide extra security. However, how many people have money stolen from them from legitimate companies on a daily basis? Thousands if not millions. The important thing is to just read the designers website (we explain everything and provide assistance for further inquiries), make sure he/she is verified through the proper payment systems (Ink Ignite is PayPal and AlertPay verified), and make sure you have proper measures put into place to ensure you don’t get your money stolen (Ink Ignite only asks for a deposit for projects and then the rest of the payment once the site is 100% functional, we also have Terms of Service and a Return Policy that you can access at any time).
Bottom line, if you don’t trust your web designer, then why should your web designer trust you? Always use safe practices when purchasing online, and look through the entire site. If something seems shifty then be sure you really get to know the company before purchasing from them.
Welcome to my new website, portfolio, and blog. A complete revamp of the site has been done in addition to moving it to a new domain. In the below paragraph I will note some new areas of the site.
There is now a Design Process page explaining more about how our company creates and maintains your web presence. I also list some new services we offer to our clients. The contact page has been updated to reflect the new services offered. You may also note that the theme for our website is changed to something a little more colorful. We’ve also come up with a nice logo for the new domain and it blends very well into the rainbow design of the theme. In case you were wondering, yes, we took down the WordPress themes page since it was not highly demanded and since we are not a themes website (although we still offer custom WordPress themes for blog-running clients).
We are working on getting a new phone number to go with the new site. Please leave any comments you have about the new site or concerns that present themselves in the comments section of this post. You may think of this site as a “beta” version if you’d like. Although we are quite confident it is up to standards.
