We recently read an interesting article on John O’Nolan’s Blog, entitled “World’s Best Web Designers Are Unknown“. John is absolutely correct in his argument, which is essentially, the most profitable and largest web design companies are actually unknown. We’d like to take this a step further, arguing that the design community as a whole needs to take a self-assessment and honestly ask itself a few questions.

There are a long list of Web Design ‘gurus’, i.e the designers that make great speeches at design conferences, write piles of books and amass huge amounts of followers on twitter. However, as John found out, the most successful web design companies are completely unknown, despite many of these companies earning multi-million pound profits a year. What we need to ask ourselves is: The people we look to for advice and help, are they offering something that they themselves haven’t got? Yes, they do the conferences, they evangelize about why CSS3 is going to change our lives and how the mobile web is (or isn’t) the next biggest thing. But are they earning the same amount as the biggest earning web design companies? Not likely. John points out that these companies don’t need to go to conferences, write books or generally big themselves up – because they focus on actually getting clients.

Different Focus

It seems that many of the design gods now focus on earning their wages by targeting the web design community, in essence, an entirely different business plan to that say of your average web designer. They promise to divulge the secrets to getting bigger and more higher paying clients, but in reality they themselves have a client list of 20 ‘internal’ projects and one for a local coffee shop. We’re not saying their not good at what they do, they just have a different business plan and a different focus.

So you want to be famous?

Ironically, many new web designers idolize and dream of becoming one of the elite. They wrongly believe that if they want to make their design business a success, they should promote themselves amongst fellow web workers. But why? Surely, you’d be better spending time seeking clients and building a profile within an industry-niche. Do you want to know the biggest secret to getting lot’s of clients, huge profits and return custom?

Be a super hero to your client.

That’s it. There’s nothing else to it. Your client doesn’t care that your site designs are 100% accessible and user-friendly (which of course they should be). They want your work to make them more money. It’s that simple. So you should go out on a limb for every client, hit deadlines, always provide your best work and be around when they need help. This simple dedication has made me a good wage for the last 4 years working as a designer. No, I’m not making millions, but I only design part-time and always have more work than I can possibly do. If I wanted, I could spend plenty of time finding more clients, but really, I don’t need to.

Earn a living or make millions?

At the end of the day, it all comes back round to your goals for your business. Are you looking to just make a comfortable income to support you and your family? Or, are you looking to set-up a design business and use it to fund future, multi-million pound companies? Only you can decide that. But don’t make the mistake of trying to follow suit if your targeting business owner clients, particularly local ones. Spending time focusing on fellow designers will likely yield little work, bar the odd overflow project. You may however pick up a few contacts for your own overflow work, or find a brilliant developer.

Use them, then drop them

That said, whilst perhaps you might not want to go down the same path as the humble web evangelist, they are useful. Many of their products, articles and blogs are written for designers and they do know what they’re on about. So, take their advice, if not just on technical matters, because they were designing when you were still playing war-hammer at school. Use them to get better at what you do and move on.