How to Start a Web Design Business (Ultimate Guide)

To be sure, there are a lot of different elements that you’ll need to consider when starting on your own. In this guide, I will teach you:

• What to do before you launch your business.
• How to set up and run the backend of your business.
• Where to find and how to deal with clients.
• Methods to grow and plan for the future.

The easiest way to beat your budding sense of overwhelm before you’re all-in on your next new venture? Proactively prepare for all of the possibilities!

1. Before you do anything else…

This first phase is when you make all the key decisions, create plans, and start setting things in motion to get a clearer view of the path ahead toward your own web design business. These early stages, often overlooked by many, are crucial if you want to move forward according to a structured plan rather than just reacting to a series of loosely connected events, which can lead to a lot of stress.

1.1. What to do before you quit your full-time job

Ideally, you’ll want to secure at least a few months of emergency expenses built up (6-12 months is the gold standard).

While still employed, take on a few side projects in your free time. Test the waters by helping your friends or family with pro bono work. This way you can gain practical experience without the legal complexities. It also enables you to build a portfolio of real projects.

Even though these are not paid or fully professional engagements they’ll help you understand the dynamics of working with others to meet their needs. You can also use these projects to experiment with new design techniques, tools, and platforms and collect valuable feedback. This is a low-pressure way to build confidence and can lead to positive word-of-mouth referrals.

While you’re biding your time, you might as well make it productive. Start working on the professional materials you’ll inevitably need, such as:

• Your professional portfolio
• Web design proposal templates
• Client pitch deck
• Business cards
• Email signature
• Social media branding (cover photo, company bios)

You should also start networking and building your reputation. Regularly post thoughtful content on Linkedin or Quora. It helps to come up with theme ideas that demonstrate your expertise: web design tips, work examples, articles you’ve written, and so on.

If you don’t like writing, there are plenty of other ways to build your professional network such as:

• First, listen, then join live Twitter Spaces discussions on topics you’re confident with.
• Join online meetups and conferences to learn from fellow entrepreneurs
• Attend in-person conferences like WordCamp where people often share their tips and struggles with their business

Of course, in order to be known for something, you have to stand for something. Specifically, you need to niche down.:

1.2. Decide who your niche/target client is

It’s not enough to add a vague “Web Developer” title to your LinkedIn profile. If you want to build clout, you need to specialize. While you might be worried that this is limiting, it’s honestly how all the top earners have made it to six-figure earnings (and more).

Once you’ve established your niche (and it’s ok to play around with this after the fact), make sure you’re communicating this consistently on your portfolio website and other online mediums.

As part of this process, you can work on developing your target customer persona (a basic bio of your target customer).

1.3. Decide what to offer

We’ve already touched on the importance of niching down. The question is: how? Depending on your skills and what you love doing you’ll need to focus on a single set of services you’ll be offering. When thinking about positioning your services, consider also the money that you can charge for them.

This is a quick illustration for the three elements to consider: your passion, your skills and the money (what pays well):

Next, here are some examples to help define your specialty:

• Design complete website projects for new businesses launching
• Focus on a specific type of website design: e-commerce, membership sites, landing pages etc.
• Focus on redesigns/responsive retrofits
• Work with clients in specific industries: government, healthcare, B2C, etc.
• Convert websites from one platform to another (i.e. Weebly, Squarespace, Drupal to WordPress)

There are no wrong answers — play around with the possibilities until you land on a winning combination!

1.4. Set your prices

For big projects, project rates are better than hourly rates because people won’t question you about how you’re spending your time — it’s already accounted for and they’ve already paid for it. Hourly rates set you up for annoying conversations and the devaluation of your expertise.

That said, hourly rates may be what you use to estimate project rates.

It’s a good idea to calculate your ideal hourly rate, even if your clients are never privy to this information. If you’re going to freelance full-time, don’t forget to build in the cost of benefits (medical insurance), sick days, and vacation days. Also, don’t forget that you should plan to save 20-30% for taxes!

2. Run your web design business effectively – the behind-the-scenes

So here’s the thing: it’s not enough to do the work. The key to figuring out how to start a web design business is taking over some roles typically handled by specialized departments within a company.

This might actually be the hardest and most annoying part of running a web design company! But the best part, creating freedom and flexibility around your passion, more than makes up for it. In time, you’ll find ways to alleviate some of this pain and find more time to focus on our core business tasks.

But since you’re just getting started, let’s focus on what you need to be thinking about right now.

2.1. Business incorporation

You may deem it necessary to incorporate your business — providing some legal protection in the form of separation between personal/business assets. In order to do this, you’ll need to fill out some forms and submit payment to your state/country. It helps to have a good lawyer or accountant on your side (or help from a local SBDC).

Regardless of where you’re incorporating your business, make sure to check on local rules and regulations as well as consulting with other businesses in your niche to determine what you need to get started.

2.2. Contracts & proposals

Ideally, before you quit your full-time job, you’ve spent some time creating a proposal template.

Some of the most important things to include in your proposal contract:

• A clearly defined scope of work (including what your project rate doesn’t cover).
• Specific deliverables in customer-friendly language.
• Timeline and project milestones.

To protect yourself, you’ll need to outline what will happen if the client cancels the project, when payments are due, the consequences of non-payment, and who holds the copyright to the designs.

2.3. Business administration

Figuring out how to run a business means taking on a bunch of roles you’d probably rather not — but don’t ignore them!

Here are a few hats you’ll have to wear as a new business owner:

• Accounting/Bookkeeping: Use an accounting tool like Freshbooks or Quickbooks to send invoices, receive payments, and track expenses.
• Marketing: Don’t wait until you’re low on client work to market your business — it’s a long-term process.
• Hiring/Management: You may eventually decide to outsource smaller projects and administrative tasks (you can try Fiverr for that), so it helps to build a process around hiring and management as soon as you start to recognize this need. In the meantime, create process documentation for as many things as you can so that even if you’re not ready to hire yet, you’ll be prepared when the time is right! Until then, you can check the best platforms to hire WordPress developers to help you decide.

2.4. Tools for productivity

As you’re working in the trenches and getting through your projects, it makes sense to stop and think about the tools that you’re using. You might already be familiar with many of the essential web design tools, but at the same time, not all of those are going to be as effective when scaled up and incorporated into a web design business.

In other words, just because something worked for you in the past, doesn’t mean that it’ll continue to work in a professional business environment that you’re in now.

Consider this roundup of excellent productivity tools for web designers and WordPress users. The list covers things like time tracking, document handling, project management, communicating with clients, working with graphic design, code development, and more.

3. How to find your first clients – strategies to get started

With all of the most important questions answered, it’s time to start publicly sharing the news that your web design business is ready for clients.

The key to success? Not treating marketing as a one-and-done task. Successful designers are constantly looking for opportunities to promote their business — not waiting until they get to a point where they have no clients and nothing to do.

3.1. Leverage your existing network

One of the best first steps is to start by making your intentions clear with your existing network. Post publicly about your new venture on social networks and reach out to friends, family, and colleagues who may be able to send you referrals. Just don’t be pushy — it’s not their job to find work for you.

3.2. Make a presence on social media

While we’re on the subject, it can also be beneficial to create a social media strategy to stay top of mind with your network using some of the ideas outlined earlier in this article.

3.3. Experiment with learning platforms

On a related note, it can also help to create short classes on platforms like Skillshare or Udemy to fill up your sales funnel and build an audience of people who can reference you.

3.4. Build a client email list

In tandem with these efforts, start building your email list by attracting leads with what is called a ‘lead magnet’ on your website.

Spending time on email marketing is important primarily because an email list is something you own — the audience you reach on social media platforms could be lost if the platform ever decides to kick you out or shut down.

3.5. Do cold outreach

No matter what, business development efforts shouldn’t be something that happens only when you need new clients — it’s an ongoing process to ensure that you constantly have work on your plate. Create a goal to cold pitch a certain number of businesses each week and track your success rate in closing prospects to determine how many inputs lead to closed and won deals.

4. Scale up, make more money & provide more value

When you’re at the beginning of your trip to becoming an entrepreneur, you’ll have to build your way up the ranks. This might mean taking on low paying job in order to build out your portfolio. It’s not exactly glamorous, but it’s something basically everyone in your position has had to do!

Once you’re more established, you’ll want to start thinking about how to build more value into your offerings so that you can make more money. To be fair, there’s nothing stopping you from getting started with these things right now. You’re only limited by your energy and focus, which will be somewhat split doing many of the other activities outlined earlier in this article.

Here are a few ideas to grow yoru business in new verticals:

▪️ Sign up as an affiliate for your favorite WordPress products (plugins, themes, hosting) and recommend them to your customers for a commission. To find success, be clear with affiliate disclosures and be transparent about your experience with the product.

▪️ Make even more money by directly managing customer web hosting and ongoing WordPress maintenance (plugin, theme, core updates — as well as periodic website content updates/changes as requested by your client).

▪️ Keep learning new things. Of course, there’s no reason to try to learn everything there is to know about web design/development. However, you should work to stay current in your niche/specialty. Follow Google’s 20% rule for learning and developing. That is to say, you should spend time going to conferences, completing courses, and reading more about coding to stay fresh. By spending time on this, you’re also essentially writing your own raise with current/new clients. Your expertise is definitely worth something!

▪️ Create information products. Selling services means that you’re limited by available time and energy. Selling products (online courses, e-books, design templates, custom UI/UX kits, tutorial videos etc.) means unlimited revenue potential. Ask yourself, “What do I know enough about to write an ebook or create an online course about?”.

Final thoughts before you go

By taking each of these steps in stride, it doesn’t have to be completely overwhelming.

Think about what you can do today to change your career path. Is it to make a call to offer your pro bono work or make some financial projections on how much money you need to make six months from now? Each of these actions will take you closer to being independent and making a living on your own soon.

What other questions do you have about starting a web design business? Share your thoughts in the comments, and together, we can learn from each other’s experiences.

Layout and presentation by Karol K.