Blog

It’s been little over a year since I decided that I wanted to see if my ‘skills’ could actually ‘pay the bills’. This past year has been fun, challenging and a great learning experience and I thought it was about time that I updated my website to reflect my brand, my expertise and what I’ve learnt over the past year.

Design for your clients not your friends

My first mistake with my old website was in building something which I thought was cool, my designer friends thought was cool and my teenager brother-in-law thought was cool. That doesn’t sound too bad though, and don’t get me wrong – I’m still really proud of my old site, but it didn’t cater to the most important people, my clients (current and potential).

I work hard to make sure that I make web design and the internet accessible and friendly to clients of all technical backgrounds – and yet my website and brand did the opposite. Not a smart move. This time round everything is friendly, simple and honest – look my logo even has a smiley face!

What have you done? What can you do? How much?

Let’s assume you’re here to consider working with me (and with a little luck, hopefully you are). You’ve come to this site with three questions, you want to know what I can do for you, you want to know if I am any good and then you want to know how much it is going to cost you to work with me.

I found on my old site that after the homepage, the next most visited page was my portfolio of work and then the contact page. There was a distinct funnel of traffic which visited these three pages in that order. Almost no one visited the pages with lots of words on them or testimonials from my existing clients; they just wanted to see what I could do.

So this time round I made sure that I had a good and up-to-date portfolio of work, I explained clearly on the homepage what I can do and I actually state my rates (as best I can).

Is it worth it?

So the work has been done, the site is finished, tested and live. The big question is – was it worth it? Let me know what you think… I guess only time will tell.