The truth of the matter is that without a web site potential clients question your professionalism, commitment to customer service, and long-term stability of your company.

The Internet is the Search Tool Consumers Use

The popularity of the web means that when potential clients find out you don’t have a website, the reaction is similar to how they would feel if you didn’t have a place of business. They either wonder why and you lose credibility or you can attract a very undesirable type of customer.

A professional website says that you are on top of your game, you have a sound business plan for the future, and that you want to make the customer’s experience with your company as positive as possible.

My Business Doesn’t Need a Website

I have spoken to business owners in many different industries and have discovered that in some markets there is a feeling that a website is just not useful for “their type of products or services”, and that no one could possibly buy their “product x” or “service y” online, so why even bother with a website?

Well a website is about more than just selling products and services. It is a tool that can give your latest news and contact information. It announces expansions and new products or services. It can boast about your good reputation, a long standing presence in the industry, or positive client testimonials.

It can also find you employees buy accepting resumes or be an information resource for customers, a way for potential clients to take a look at your facilities or equipment.

At the very least a website should be there to assist your prospective clients and existing customers with your location, mailing address, hours of operations and what holidays your company is closed.

When phoning around, many consumers will look elsewhere the instant they call and get a busy signal, voicemail, or are put on hold for too long. But your website is always on, and always there working for you.

Tightening the purse strings is the classic stance companies take during a financial slump and although the repercussions are felt throughout all industries how are we as freelancers supposed to prepare and weather the storm? How long will all this last? These are both great questions I have asked myself over the years and I will let you know what has worked.

Managing your way through tough times by putting a little percentage of your earnings away each pay cheque and cutting back on expenses can only get you so far in these economic times of uncertainty, so besides the use of tried tested and true “saving for a rainy day” methods you also need to change your marketing strategy and cater to your clients both current and prospective by showing them that you can save them some money by hiring you.

Prove Your Worth

Because I worked in the pizza industry for many years I will use it as an example of how you can approach your current and existing clients. Say for instance you are hired by a pizzeria that mail out flyers four times a year with every season autumn, winter, spring and summer. This is the only marketing and advertising that they do and it has worked for them for over ten years.

Their print material is a standard double sided two fold full colour brochure and the total cost to print and send it out every quarter (every 3 months) comes just under the $40 000 budget they set aside annually. How are you to seamlessly save them money and provide the same benefits of their marketing and advertising campaigns?

Here Are the Numbers

Now we are going to do a little math, I have used round numbers to make it easier to understand. The $40 000 yearly budget is for 4 ad campaigns which works out to $10 000 quarterly. It cost $1000 to design, $6000 to print and $3000 to deliver the flyers to every mailbox in town.

This is what you should do

Create a website that provides all the pizzeria’s basic information like the history of the business, contact info (blah blah blah) but most importantly the details of their menu. Of course you can get fancier but the menu is the most important part of the formula, essentially you are going to remove it from their print advertisements making their flyer smaller which costs less.

So let’s say that you have built the website and you cut the flyer in half by removing all the menu items only keeping the seasonal specials letting the readers know that the full menu is on the website of course. The flyer will now be significantly less to produce, we’ll say a third (it will be cheaper than that) so the $6000 it use to cost to print will now only be $4020 that is a savings $1980 which will translate to $7920 over the course of the year or 20%.

Now you also have to factor in that the website hasn’t been planed or paid for so you will need to take another $2000 away which would make the final total of savings come out to $5920.

Like I said the numbers I used are rounded and I know for a fact that the price to print would be cut closer in half rather than in a third but I wanted to show that it doesn’t take much to trim the fat. You can also play with two colours instead of four and try different kinds of paper to get your print costs even lower.

This is just a basic explanation. I never went into how much work is actually involved into making up a marketing plan like this; it is not easy and will only get better the more you use it. It can also be adapted to many other industries and businesses that have marketing budgets and do print advertisements annually.

Pick an industry and do your research, find out how much it would cost to put together a marketing package like this. Hit all the businesses in that industry with your numbers, clients understand numbers and it is your confidence and ability to save them money that will get you work in an economic downturn.

These problems range in size from minor to major and the usual suspects are web standards and compliance which pretty much means that websites function well in one browser but differently or maybe not even at all in others. Another huge issue is usability, if you don’t understand how the website works how are you ever going to navigate to the information you are looking for?

So let’s say a website passes all these hurdles, it adheres to web standards and functions properly in Firefox, Safari, Opera, the new Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 7 and even the dreaded IE6. It is so simple to use even your granny or your mouth breathing nephew can use it, but does it look good?

Not only do you have to work within a strict set of rules to impact the largest amount of users you have to present it graphically in away the is very pleasing to the eye and simultaneously compliments the content that is being examined.

Unfortunately Most Websites Just Plain Suck

You would expect when any of these vulnerabilities are overlooked it is either very small companies, nonprofits or just an amateur’s personal space but unfortunately that is not the case because these practices are rampant. When I’m surfing the web I come across the very same problems in all industry websites almost on a daily basis.

Now I know that my perception of the web is skewed because of my trained eye and it may sound like I am complaining about the state of the web but really I am not. I am fully aware that from a business stand point it is much better for me that most websites are subpar which finally brings me to the very point of this blog entry, bad graphic and web designers.

Specifically the graphic and web designers in the Regional Municipality of Durham where I live, my competition who rate from very poor to really good as in most places. Fortunately there is only a hand full of us good designers in the Durham Region (notice I said us? …lol) so you would think that most business owners and groups commissioning websites would stay away from all the riffraff but they haven’t.

Many Clients Distrust Designers Because of Past Experiences

What I have found is that clients have almost always had a bad experience from their first website and usually that is why they are looking to get a second one done. This is the proverbial double edged sword, on one hand you are talking shop and networking with potential clients and on the other hand they come with baggage and distrust from the bad experience they had with the last design studio or freelancer they worked with.

A couple of tell tale signs of bad design habits to look out for when you are in need of graphic or web design work are no website or portfolio,  website doesn’t function properly or a date on the site is a year or two old. Of course there are many others but that is for a later blog entry you get the idea.

An indicator of a good designer or Design Company is how thorough they are and if they have some sort of process that they use to get the job done. Using a design process is key no matter what size or type of project is being commissioned and you will quickly find that there will most likely be issues in a project that were otherwise unforeseen by the client but by having a design process in place these issues are recognized and addressed before they become a problem.

Good Work Ethic

As much as I would like to out some of the major local culprits in the Ajax, Pickering, Whitby and Oshawa graphic and web design industry I feel that it would do more damage than good as I have set some strict business and moral standards for myself and Digital Deceptions and reframe from bad mouthing anyone specifically and let the work both theirs an mine speak for itself.

So if you are a business owner, have a unique product or idea and are in need of hiring a local graphic or web designer from the Durham Region area, have a look at my portfolio before you make your decision, Digital Deceptions creates all types of graphics from logos to print layouts and I specialize in web design and animation.

This kind of thinking is a “Big-box” type of customer service model that has been done to death and is so cliché. It may work in those types of industries or not I am not here to dispute that, where I know it doesn’t work is in the Web Design industry.

Here is a good example, say a first time client who owns a bookstore and who has never had a website before wanted to finally get a web presence, that’s great right? Say they also wanted a shopping cart on the site so they could sell their books online.

What they want is a website that they can tie into their already established products, services and business model making them some extra money. What they need is a basic website telling potential and existing customers about the company, what is going on, store hours and contact information.

Website Owner’s Have an Obligation

Having a website is a responsibility and if they can’t live up to a little one how are they going to be with a much larger and sophisticated one? You also have to let your clients know that just because you build them what they ask for that people aren’t just going to come and use it.

If you don’t have an existing audience or a limited number of visitors you are really going to need marketing and advertising which costs lots more money if you want to let the world know you are out there. Ideally and financially it is better to grow and adapt to achieve client expectations.

A Freelancer’s Obligation

As a professional it is your job to tell your client the truth and not to up sell them on extra services that they don’t need. Be honest and tell them that to justify having a shopping cart on a website you are going to need a certain amount of traffic to make it beneficial to them. To convert visitors into shoppers is a numbers game.

Until you get that target amount of visitors surfing the site a shopping cart is not going to be worth the extra cash to your client. You can built them what they need instead, keeping track of their web statistics and future proofing the design with the knowledge that they want a shopping cart at a later date.

So by telling the truth and not going for the up sell you can potentially get two or more websites out of them. Let them know that websites are like any other type of branded material they have and every so often they need to be redesigned, reproduced, rethought out and recreated.

It is this type of honesty that brings back repeat business and makes every potential client a lifelong customer. Which in the end is they type client you want.