You Give Web Design a Bad Name: 5 Industry Practices I’m Sick of Hiding

This week I am talking all about the industry practices that people hate, and when I say people, I’m talking about web designers. Hi, I’m Holly Christie. I’m from Websites Made Simple.

I am a website designer. I am also a mentor to you, lovely website designers, and I am here to make sure you get to have a career that you absolutely love without being driven into the ground by it. So ready to get started. I asked on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago what web designers hated about our industry.

1. And whilst the post itself got something like 130 comments, a lot of them were very similar and I grouped them into what will become this episode and one other episode and thought that we could talk them through together. So let’s get started. The very first one that people said were prebuilt websites being marketed as custom websites.

Uh, I have to say I absolutely agree with this and if you’ve been following this podcast for a while, you will know I am not a fan of Elemental, and I think some of my early. Experience of Elemental coming to the market. ’cause I’d been a web designer way before Elemental was a thing, is that people use these elemental templates and they marketed as a custom built website and it is not.

And I worked with a really lovely client who, she came to me, she said she’d spent 5,000 pounds on a website where the. Developer, um, had just dropped the content into an elemental website. It’s into an elemental prebuilt template. And she came to me and said that she was really, um, feeling that she wasn’t getting a return on the investment.

And when we looked into it, there wasn’t any SEO structure on the website. Um, there wasn’t really any personality on the website and there was a lot that we ended up pulling around and doing differently and. It kind of brings us into the second point, which is over promising and under-delivering, and someone said, especially on timelines as well, that often a web designer or a developer will say, oh, we can get this done in three weeks or something like that, and it can be months and months later.

And the client still doesn’t have anything that they can show, um, you know, for their investments. And this does happen on both sides. You know, we do, as web developers, we do get clients, ghost us and not give us the content. And I usually find that people get very, very stuck around the copywriting at.

Stages of, um, their kind of content creation there as well. But, um, the developers who kind of take the money and they disappear off with the design and they don’t have a solid process in place, they’re the ones who are really giving the industry a bad name. Now, if you are thinking, oh God, I don’t mean this to feel like me, but it does feel like me, I just get a bit overwhelmed and I’m not very good at allocating my time to it.

I’m here to help you with that. I have my website designers contract pack, which you can get from the website websites made simple.co uk in. It has every type of contract you can ever possibly need for running a website design process, but it has, most importantly, the one that you are going to give your clients.

It has the timelines in there with a breakdown of what will happen week by week, and it’s really. Good for helping keep you on task with your builds. And pretty soon you’ll get into a routine with this as well. And then you will wonder how you lived without it. Because trust me, this is a piece of gold and you can get it from websites made simple.co uk.

So. The other part of that was, um, the lack of transparency and communication that also is covered in the web website designers contract pack because it says when the client will be hearing from them and you are contracted to do that. Um, but people also said about this over promising and under delivering that sometimes web designers will say anything to try and make the sale.

And they say, yeah, yeah, I can do this and I can do that. And when it actually comes down to it. They can’t, and they do a really poor job of it. And what they need to do at that point is look at upskilling. They may to look at, maybe need to look at collaborating with someone, maybe have someone, um, finish off the design, or I offer website designers mentoring.

So that they, we can work through the design together so that we can get that user journey right and give something the client’s going to be really happy with. It also means that they’re going to be upskills as well, so it’s a good investment to make there as well. So. The next point from web designers, were not understanding the tech, the security, and what goes into a good website.

Totally agree with that one. And people can find that they offer a certain tech stack because they know it, rather than it being the absolute right best one for the client as well. And it is really important that we keep skills up, that we keep looking at what’s new, that we look at better ways that we can do, uh, the websites and one of the ways of doing that as well.

Is looking at streamlining. You know, I often have websites that have five plugins or less, and that’s including SEO and Security and Speed Optimizer plugins. So it’s really important that we do understand what we are actually offering for the client and that we are learning this stuff because this tech is evolving all of the time, and it’s really important that you keep up with that as well.

And people said, as well as under not understanding the tech and the security and stuff, um, that they focus on pretty rather than the actual important things like conversion and whether the website’s actually getting any leads through it. Because anyone can design something pretty. If that was the case, we’d all be using Canva websites, you know, ’cause they’re great for that sort of thing.

But pretty, websites don’t convert websites which are being put together by a skilled professional with a deep understanding of the industry. That’s what converts. And the final one for today is one of the most hated ones in the web designers industry is hijacking other people’s posts for work. And someone else said, anytime there is a post.

Um, advertising a job opportunity. Web devs are crawling all over it. Now. I have my own experience with this last week actually looking for a branding designer and I put a post on LinkedIn. So could people recommend branding designers? Um, the post is standing at 15,000 impressions. It’s got over 130 comments.

It, I have had people contacting my personal mobile at home during the evenings. I’ve had people contacting my personal email address, people on LinkedIn, people sending really quite aggressive follow up as well, and. Web designers do this as well. I just personally don’t advertise web designers. If I, um, choose to work with someone, they’ll usually be known to me or they’ll always be known to me, and it’s a really bad practice, but it’s also a really bad way of getting work.

I mean, on my post, I was asking people to recommend someone they had worked with and someone that they knew rather than people recommending themselves. And that didn’t stop people saying, you know, I would like to recommend me and that, but it is. It’s not a way to stand out. It’s not a way to market your business.

You’ll find load of resources on this podcast website. The website’s made simple.co uk, which will help you get clients for your business. But. We all, you know, I always say there’s a seat at the table for everyone here, but it is learning about which seat you actually want to sit at and what type of websites you want to be building and which type of client you want to build them for.

Just chucking your pat in the ring on another web devs paste. Not the way of doing it. Really look at getting your messaging out there and be confident in what you’re putting out there rather than relying on other people’s posts, because at the best it will look rude. At worst, you’ll get blocked by the person who’s post it is.

So one final one is. Sorry, I missed this. I am reading this off of a list, so I think I probably already said one final one, but the final one, and this is a big one actually in this industry and it is AI built website and vibe coding. Um. Yeah, let’s not do that. Let’s not do it at all. Um, yes, you can build, uh, websites using ai.

Yes, you can put a bit of info in there and you can get AI to build your website. Will the website convert? No. Will it bring in leads? No. Will it be a good representation of your business? No. Will you get really fed up and lose faith in the website that you’ve got? Absolutely yes. And vibe coding. Look, I’ll be the first to say you don’t need to code to be a web designer, and I actively prefer page builder websites because I like clients to be able to have control of their website and the only way they can do that.

Particularly, I work with lots of coaches and HR professionals and people who are looking at changing their offers, and they want to be able to build their own pages. They want to edit pages. They can’t do that with a hard coded website. So, you know, we’ve all got different places that we stand on this, but for me, I’m absolutely fine as long as people know.

The understand what the user journey should be, what the UX experience is on the website. They understand how to optimize the website, how to actually make it really, really tight into Google. Like it, that’s fine by me, but vibe coding, it just, uh. It just feels a bit hipster. Um, and it’s not a great way to code ai.

Code is not good code. I mean, sometimes it’s okay to chuck something in AI and say, can you debug this for me? But I think websites are still a long way away from AI giving you the absolute ultimate thing that you, or ultimate result that you want from websites. So I really would recommend. That you get a good old fashioned human in the website, a human who is building it properly, who is building.

And you know, when I said about people had a real issue with pre-built being marketed as customs, that’s not to say don’t use pre-built if that’s where your skillset lies. I. That’s absolutely fine, but don’t try and pretend and pass it off as something that it’s not. Now, if you haven’t connected with me on LinkedIn too, come and find me.

I’m at Holly c Christie, and, um, if you would like to add your comments to things in the industry that really annoy you as a web designer, drop me a line at hello@websitesmadesimple.co uk or look me up on LinkedIn and I’ll look forward to hearing from you. And until next time, see you again.