093 – Biggest Mistakes Web Designers Make (and How to Avoid Them)

Josh 0:02
Hey, everybody, welcome into the podcast, this is Episode 93. And in this one, we’re gonna be covering some of the biggest mistakes that most all web designers make. But more importantly, I’m going to give you some action steps and a path to avoid those. These are all things that I think pretty much every single one of these I’ve done myself particularly early on. So for those of you who are early in your web design journey, or even if you’ve been doing it for a while, and maybe you find that you’ve been making some mistakes over and over, hopefully, these are good red flags for you to be able to look out for. And again, avoid those because I want to help you avoid a lot of the mistakes that I’ve made as a web designer. And a lot of these things I just didn’t even think about or know about, because they weren’t really brought to my attention until I learned the hard way on these. So this is going to help you in every area of your web design business from design and the business side of things with your time with your sanity. So let’s just get into it, I’ve actually got 15 for you. And what we’re gonna do, I’m sure they are, you know, hundreds or 1000s I could go into, but I’ve kind of listed out the top 15 mistakes that again, most of these I’ve done myself particularly early on. And what I’m going to do is list these out, we’re going to talk about the mistakes, and then we’re going to go one by one, I’m going to tell you my recommendation for how to get past those and how to avoid those. So let’s just dive into it. Let’s get right into this one.

The “Mistakes”

Josh 1:44
Number one, charging too little, that is probably one of the biggest mistakes you can make with any industry with any business. But as web designers, we tend to devalue our services. So charging too little is a big, big mistake, and it will literally cost you. That’s a good one.

Josh 2:03
All right, number two, you take on every client, this is another big one, this kind of goes back to being able to say no and confidently say no, to a not so good fitting client. Now early on. And we’ll talk about how to avoid this early on, you’ll say a lot more yeses than knows. But as soon as you get to a point where you can start being more picky, and start focusing on good clients, you do not want to take on every client. And we’ll talk about how to combat that.

Josh 2:30
Number three, be available 24 seven, if you want to know a great way to just destroy your sanity and just kill your productivity. Just keep your phone on keep your keep your email open and keep all your notifications on 24 seven, and pretty soon, you’ll find out that you are going to go crazy. And being available 24 seven for your clients is actually not what you want to do, unless you’re a support center. So I doubt I’m talking to anybody who wants to be a support center right now. So being available 24 seven is a big mistake.

Josh 3:02
Number four, you falsely represent yourself meaning it’s just you maybe a solopreneur as a web designer, but some reason for some reason your website says we in it comes across like a big agency, well, you’ll find out that if you don’t represent you, and the way you or your agency actually is as far as size and your process and everything that’s gonna come back to bite you in the butt. So that is a big mistake if you falsely represent yourself. And again, the the strategies to help avoid these are coming up next.

Josh 3:33
Number five, you look at good designs, but you look at them with jealousy, and they don’t inspire you, but they actually make you feel bad. Let me tell you, it’s okay to feel this way. You’re probably if you hear this, you’re probably like oh my gosh, I’d Yep, I absolutely do that. I just want to give you a little, you know, give you a little encouragement by saying I understand sometimes you look at good designs, and you would think like I want to be inspired, but I actually freaking hate this designer, because it’s so good. That’s okay. But it is a mistake, it is a mistake. So that’s number five.

Josh 4:03
Number six, you offer way too many services. Way too many services means you’re a jack of all trades and Master of None. And you’ll find out that if you offer too much, it can be extremely costly.

Josh 4:15
Number seven, change your tools. If you’re changing your tools constantly, that is super, super costly, because you’re constantly learning something new. So that’s a big mistake.

Josh 4:26
Number eight, you don’t value your time. Does that sound familiar? Are you trading your time for money all the time? And are you maybe there’s a tool or a service that can help you get something done but you figure you know what, why pay for it? When I can do it myself. I’ll tell you this right now, if you have that mentality as far as why pay somebody to do it when I can do it myself. You will not go very far in business. You literally can’t like it’s not even that’s not even an opinion that is fact you cannot go very far in business. If you do everything yourself. So you’ve got to value your time. If you don’t, that’s a huge mistake. And this is what a lot of salary people experience when they become a business owner. If you come from the corporate world, where you’re used to clocking in, and you’re on a salary position, you don’t value your time. Because once you become an entrepreneur and a business owner and a website designer, you figure out that if as long as you’re more productive in your time, the sky’s the limit. So that’s number eight.

Josh 5:26
Number nine, you do everything custom or from scratch, this is talking about building and the design aspect of web design. If you want to know a way to be extremely unprofitable, is unprofitable word? Well, it is here, then try to just build every website from scratch custom. And you’ll find out that your websites are going to take about three times longer than they should. So that’s number nine.

Josh 5:49
Number 10 you do everything yourself. Let me say as somebody who has struggled with this, this is probably my biggest struggle as an entrepreneur, I just tend to like to do stuff myself, it’ll cost you and I’m experiencing that right now there are some areas where just this week, I was doing some stuff where I’m like, I should not be doing this. And it’s not that I’m better than that task. But it’s that I’m not focusing on high level stuff I’m doing, you know, low level $10 an hour tasks that’s taking up time, I need to delegate that. And that’s something we’re going to talk about here. So if you’re doing everything yourself, that is also a mistake, we’ll talk about the solutions here shortly.

Josh 6:27
Number 11. You don’t communicate throughout the project huge for the client aspect of things if you just get going on a design, but then disappear. That’s a big mistake.

Josh 6:37
Number 12. You talk like a web designer to clients. Just remember, clients don’t know what HTML is. They don’t know what CSS is, most of them don’t even know what WordPress is. So we’re gonna talk about how to not do that.

Josh 6:48
Number 13. You don’t empower your clients. So if we just build a website, and then hope for the best, it’s not going to end up going well. And I’ll tell you some examples of why that is the case here shortly.

Josh 7:00
Number 14, you neglect previous and current clients, meaning you’re so focused on the next new client, you’re so focused on the rat race of getting a new lead, getting a new lead, getting a new client getting a new client that you forget that you can actually make a lot more money with people you’ve already sold to.

Josh 7:17
And then finally, you don’t build a referral network for those of you who are going in alone. And you think that’s just the way that it has to be, let me tell you, it doesn’t have to be that way. And building an incredible referral network around you will help you with these big mistakes.

Josh 7:33
So let’s talk about let’s go back through these. And I’ll give you the kind of solutions on how to avoid these. And I do want to say I did an episode a little while back on the podcast. And that was Episode 62. About the biggest traps that most web designers fall into. These are similar, there are some of these that will probably sound familiar, if you listen to the episode again, that was 62, Episode 62. But these are not there’s a little bit of a difference between traps and mistakes. So just a heads up, some of these are going to be a little bit similar. But these are focused on mistakes that we commonly make. So again, we just went through all those. Now let’s go back through them and talk about the solutions and how to avoid these.

The “Solutions”

Josh 8:12
So number one charging too little, here’s a solution ready for it. It’s this is mind blowing. This is this is just, this is top of the line stuff, raise your rates. That’s it, raise your rates. Now easier said than done, I know. But I’m amazed at how many people lock themselves into a position where they just can’t get ahead in their business because their rates are too little or too low. So let me encourage you by saying right now where your rates are, I guarantee you can raise them, even if they’re in the same what I like to call price bucket. So let’s say you’re charging, on average, maybe like 900 bucks or 1000 bucks for a typical website. Well, if charging three or 4000 makes you feel really nervous and you just your palms got a little sweaty or you think your your current client base is just not going to go with that. A little trick that I started doing was to just raise my rates in that same what I call price bucket. And in this case, that would be like 1500. Because if you raise your prices to 1500, you’re already making an extra 15% of excuse me an extra 50% of what you were normally making. And let me tell you, the clients that are doing 1000 are going to do 1500 just fine. And I can tell you that in confidence because that’s exactly what I discovered. When I was charging 1000 1200 bucks once I upped my rates to 1500 and just under two grand, all of those same clients went with that rate. Now, a $4,000 project that’s a little bit different, but as long as you add more value you can get there. But the trick to overcoming charging too little number one is just to raise your rates. So if you can add a lot more value and you’re getting more confident in your processes and what you’re offering for your clients. You can absolutely charge a much higher tier, but for right now Just raise your rates a little bit. And I promise you, your clients will still go for that range. And the beauty is you start making a little more, and that’s going to build your confidence to charge a lot more as you move forward. So there’s your solution to number one.

Josh 10:11
Now, number two, taking on every client, again, we talked about how detrimental this can be, because you can take on a lot of bad clients. And the solution to this is to create a funnel, and create some sort of weed out process. Now those of you who have been through my business course, you know exactly what I recommend doing. And that is to separate your leads from questionable leads to quality leads, questionable leads, should go somewhere else a page. And we’ll talk about this in an upcoming episode. But I have a hidden page called my potential client page, which has my price ranges there. And they always say starting at that way, they see some starting at price ranges. So for the clients who are not going to pay more than 300 bucks, I don’t even want to talk to them, I want them to see that and then immediately move on, because those are the tire kickers that are not worth my time. Now, however, if there’s a really good client that goes through that, they’ll see those price ranges and say, okay, you know, that’s about what I’m expecting, or what I’m getting from other quotes, so then they’ll move forward. And on the other hand, if you have a really good quality lead that you think is a great a client, and maybe they have a big budget, maybe there’s somebody you know, is going to be fine with a 5,10 $15,000 investment, they shouldn’t even see that page. So those are the clients, you can start talking with more directly, and go into the proposal and strategy phase, without taking them down a weed out type of funnel. But creating some type of weed out funnel is key to not taking on every client. And again, we’ll talk about this in a little more, or for those of you who are really ready to do this, join my business course because I show you how I do that. And that is the key a weed out funnel to take those questionable leads, let you know, take them somewhere else and weed them out. That’s the solution for taking on every client.

Josh 11:52
Number three, again being available 24 seven, absolutely terrible, because your view become a support person. And I experienced a lot of issues with clients just calling me nonstop. And me just thinking that I needed to be available right when they called and then it dawned on me. You know what? Why do I need to answer calls constantly, if I’m going to be balancing my creativity, and I’ve got other calls that I’m doing and you know, I’m working on a website or working on proposals, it dawned on me that I don’t need to answer the phone when they ring, or when they’re calling me, what I learned to do was to set up call days and call times. And this would be for I mean, there’s there’s some, you know, extra circumstances where maybe if a site is down or there’s something broken, you can take a call and some sort of emergency. But the biggest trick is to just turn your phone off. Like I turn my phone off all the time. Now I actually rarely have my phone on when I’m working on stuff because I don’t need to answer if somebody’s calling, I will get back to them when I plan to get back to them. That’s the mindset I want you to have. Because if you don’t, if you just answer your phone, and answer text and answer all your notifications and messages, at any point in the day, you are literally going to work yourself ragged, you’re going to lose your sanity, because you’re going to be a support person, and you’re not going to be a web designer, or a business owner. So you got to protect your time when it comes to your calls. And again, just set up call times or call days like you could tell clients, you know, I’d love to talk about this, let’s schedule a strategy call. And we’ll do it you know, on Tuesday, like my calls, for example, are Tuesdays Wednesdays and Thursdays I don’t do podcasts, generally on Mondays or Fridays unless there’s a rare situation. And you can have that same mindset with your clients, you can tell them I only do calls on Tuesdays and Thursdays or something. And they can call you then or you can schedule on again, unless there’s some sort of urgent type of issue. But most everything can be an email. So set those parameters, set those constraints, and don’t be available. 24/7.

Josh 13:57
Number four, falsely representing yourself, like we talked about the problem with this. And this is really, really common. And I understand a lot of web designers, you might be a solopreneur. And you might think well my clients want to work with somebody who’s not just one person, they want an agency well come to find out they might not want an agency. And either way, if it’s just you running your business, don’t say we on our on your website, don’t come across like a big agency if it is just you, because it’s a complete falsely representation. Excuse me, let me say that correctly, a complete false representation of yourself. So if it is just you say you, but the trick is, particularly for those of you who are a solopreneur but you think that your clients might want to have somebody who you know has some other people involved help out if you get really busy. You can say that you have an incredible network of designers to turn to particularly those of you who are in like my facebook group, my Divi web designers Facebook group that is a free group that is technically you could say you have a amazing network, excuse me of people right there. For those of you who are in my membership, obviously, this is what we talk about big time, where you are automatically in an incredible network of people to support you that way. It is just doing your business, but you’re not alone, I don’t want you to be alone in your web design journey. So, you know, just represent where you are and put your personality in your website, the way you talk, your sense of humor, your sense of style, put that in your website, don’t be afraid to be you. And to really talk like you, I do that with my website. Obviously, it’s a little different, because mine’s a personal brand site. But even within transit, I talked like me. So I really want to encourage you to do that. And again, don’t false advertise yourself, if it’s just you, and a couple people put that on your website. People don’t even want to work with big agencies now because they feel like a number when they do. So that’s the key to getting over that one falsely representing yourself.

Josh 15:52
Number five, the problem was looking at good designs with jealousy. And my encouragement for you is to be intentional about when you look at a nice design, appreciate it and have a mindset of learning from it. This is the big key because if you don’t, you’re gonna, I’m telling you, you’re going to look at it. And I’m sure you you’re backing me up in this, you’re going to look at it and you’re gonna start feeling jealous and just being like, Oh my gosh, there’s so much better than me. Why am I even doing this? I’m a complete imposter. What am I doing here, my designs suck compared to this. But that’s gonna take you down a very dangerous, dangerous path. The trick and the key to overcoming that is to look at it and appreciate it and learn from it. This is what I’m doing right now I see websites, where I’m like, Oh my gosh, like I’ve been doing this for over a decade. And I can’t even touch this amazing design. What you know, what am I doing? I’m teaching people what I can’t even design like this. And sometimes I catch myself feeling like that. But then I, I’m preaching this to myself, and I’m really taking this seriously, I look at it and I say you know what, okay, this is amazing. What can I learn from it? What can I implement? And what can i model to help design like this. So that’s number five, appreciate good designs don’t get jealous.

Josh 17:01
Number six, the problem was offering too many services. Like I said, if you offer too many, there’s no way you’re going to be able to keep up with everything. What’s very common in web design is I see web designers have web design, SEO, maintenance, logo design, print design, videography, social media ads, digital marketing, there’s just there’s so much and unless you have a team and specialists who know those things, there’s just no way you’re going to be able to keep up with everything. And you’re going to have half-assed services across the board, you’re going to be super stressed out, you’re just you can’t even literally you don’t have enough time in the day to learn everything. So the only way you can offer that many services is if you either partner up with somebody who’s a specialist there, or you have somebody on staff, or that you have as a contractor who can do those things really well, particularly social media, because a lot of people feel like they need to do social media with web design. I never did, because social media just changes constantly. There’s no way I could personally keep up with web design, let alone, you know, like web design and SEO and maintenance. Those were fine. For me, that was plenty enough for me to keep up with. There’s no way I could add social media, and everything else. So refine your services. My recommendation is to pick your top three, what services do you enjoy doing? First of all, what services do you know well, and that you’re competent at and what services are needed for your clients. Most of them are website design, maintenance, and SEO, those are the three services I recommend, because those are pretty much what most all web design clients need. But if you feel like you’re good at logo design and branding, and maybe videography or something, you can always add those as secondary services, but you want to focus on the ones that are going to be the biggest ROI for you and that you enjoy doing. So number six, refine your services.

Josh 18:44
Number seven, this challenge was too many tools, you changing your tools constantly. This is very elementary idea. But my recommendation to you is just to stick with what works and stop changing stuff constantly. If you’re using a project management system that works and it’s going well, don’t change it. That’s a big one. A lot of people tend to change project management or invoicing software. I mean, it’s that stuff can be a huge time suck. And for me, I’ve always used 17 hats for my client profile management for invoicing and proposals, contracts and payments. And then I use Basecamp for project management and our tools our on site tools Divi as our WordPress theme, a handful of plugins that we trust and recommend. And that’s basically it. It’s, it’s I don’t use that many tools that I’m bouncing back and forth between. And even if the pricing is a little more premium, I’m fine with it as long as it works because I know it will save me time and money and energy in the long run. So stick with what works. Don’t you have to avoid the shiny new tool syndrome. That’s one of the traps I mentioned in Episode 62 is a lot of times as web designers we see something new or like email apps are a big one. A lot of people see email apps and want to change And then it just ends up being a huge time suck. So be aware of that and just stick with what works.

Josh 20:05
Now, speaking of valuing your time, that’s number eight, again, you don’t value your time. Here’s the key to that, you have to protect your time, and you have to value it, you have to actually realize your income. And what you want to get out of life is completely related to what you can do with your time. For those of you who are like me who are parent entrepreneurs, you probably realize this, once you become a parent, you have to get serious about your time, because you can’t screw around with your time like you were as a single person or somebody who didn’t have kids. And you could just work all the time. It’s amazing how much time I worked without even realizing it. And then once kids come along, it’s like, oh, wow, I’m actually working a lot more than I thought, because I should be playing with my you know, my kid on the ground. But here I am doing email night. So you got to value your time. And the biggest thing is you got to protect it. And my biggest and we actually just talked about this in Episode 90. So if you haven’t listened to that episode, go back to that, because it’s all about time management tips to help you get the most out of your time, make sure you get back to that because for me, it’s really all about having deep work segments and having my work very intentional about what I want to get done and valuing that time. And then being strict about it. Like if I’m only going to work this amount of time today, that’s when I’m going to work, I’m not going to check email on the night, I’m not going to do stuff, where I should be hanging out with my family, you got to protect your time, you have to value your time more than anything in your business, your time is the most important thing and a really practical thing. For those of you who are early in your career, this will probably what you’re thinking, I could figure out a CSS trick. Or I could look up something and do a bunch of like, why would I need a course or something if I could do it for free. And I could find it on Google. The key. And the difference is the time. If you can go through some sort of training, or you can go through something that’s going to help you expedite your time and learn something and you know, 10 times faster than having to find everything yourself. That’s what you need to do. Because right now, if you have that mindset, where you just want to do everything yourself and figure it all out for free. That means you don’t value your time, and you’re gonna realize you, some of you will probably hear that, and maybe that’ll make you think but I guarantee a lot of you listening right now are not going to hear that. But then three years from now, you’re going to be like damn, I wish I would have listened to Josh and actually valued my time, because I would have got ahead a lot faster. So either way, no matter where you are in your journey, value your time and protect it, protect your time to get stuff done as quickly as possible to help you get the biggest return on investment for your time.

Josh 22:31
Now, number nine, doing everything from scratch. Again, like I mentioned, this applies to website builds and design. This was the biggie for me in the early days. For some reason, it just did not dawn on me to start saving templates and reusing code snippets, like you guys know, I think most of you know I’m a big proponent of CSS, I love CSS. But for some reason I didn’t save my CSS in the early days, I just kept on rewriting it over and over and over. And one day, I was like, wait a minute, why don’t I just pull? It’s the similar design that I did on a couple websites ago, why don’t I just pull a bunch of that code and redesign it here and just tweak it? For some reason. I felt like that was cheating. Like I was, you know, because I was saving time, it was like a disservice or kind of a shortcut. But that is totally fine. That’s what you should do. You should be speeding up your website designs, every project you do, ideally, and your clients not gonna care. Does your client want you to rewrite everything custom every time and stress yourself out? Or does your client want you to get their project done faster, and feel good and have more energy to do the conversion based stuff and client management, they want the latter, they want you to do that. So reuse your stuff, particularly those of you using Divi. I’m a I’ve been very outspoken with reusing your templates, if you create an About Us page that one client loves, reuse that for another project. No one cares. Now, I wouldn’t recommend ripping off the same design every time particularly for your homepage, you can get custom and really go wild on home pages because that’s what most people see in your portfolio. But contact pages, services pages about us pages. If you have some templates that you’ve created that are working really well reuse those bad boys and reuse your code stuff that’s gonna save you some time.

Josh 24:12
Now, number 10 doing everything yourself. Again, this is my biggest struggle because I am somebody who has a little bit of a control issue and I like to do stuff myself. But I’ll use my podcast as an example. I recently hired my VA Kam. And she does all of the distributing now of the podcast. So she does the post. She does the outline. She does the transcriptions. She does all the work on YouTube and buzzsprout where I where I publish the episodes that go out to all the directories. I get the episode done. As of right now I still do the post editing or the post production. I get the images together, and I get all the notes together. But that’s it. That’s all I do. And I delegate everything else to her to be able to delegate that out and let me tell you it has saved me so much time. But before that I thought I don’t know if I trust anybody to do this. But as soon as I made a really nice standard operating procedure and got that out, it’s been revolutionary for me in my time. And you can have the same approach to your business as well delegate, what you don’t want to do or what you’re not suited for, especially low level tasks. If you can start delegating some stuff that’s just taking forever, whether it’s admin stuff, or whether it’s basic content, kind of stuff with web design, start delegating, and I promise you, you’re gonna rock your world if you do. So that’s number 10. Let’s bust through these last few here.

Josh 25:33
Number 11, you don’t communicate through the project with the client. There’s a simple key to this, to avoid this over communication, over communicate with your client, if you think you are reaching out to your client too much like you’re being over communicated. I don’t know if that’s a word either. But again, where we make up words on this podcast, your client is going to love that, because you might seem like you’re reaching out all the time. But for them, if they hear from you a couple times a week, that’s going to be amazing. And my rule of thumb is that clients should not go more than a week without hearing from you. If you’re designing their site, even if you don’t have any project progress to report, just tell them, Hey, I’m working on it a nano notification update, just let them know, Hey, I’m working on it. Over communicate over communicate with your clients. And I promise you that’s going to help with other areas of the project with revisions with feedback with getting a testimonial with a you know, creating a client for life, it’s going to help you upsell because they’re going to trust you. And they’re going to love that experience and say, Yeah, I love working with Josh and his team. Absolutely, let’s let’s take the next step over communicate. That’s what it’s all about.

Josh 26:37
Number 12. Again, talking like a web designer to clients, you may not think about this when you’re meeting with clients. And the early days, I know I didn’t, I was throwing out terms like like coding terms, and WordPress and SEO stuff. And then I realize a lot of my clients are looking me like they’re giving me like this deer in the headlights kind of look. And it’s because they have no idea what any of that stuff is. And you can’t blame them for that. So you need to talk at their level. So just be very aware, be intentional about your client, some clients are going to be more savvy than others. So you might be able to talk about WordPress and plugins and some other stuff. But the majority of them aren’t going to know anything about that world. So don’t expect them to know about domain stuff, or MX records or a records or DNS stuff, don’t expect them to know about that. Educate them and talk at their level.

Josh 27:24
And that actually brings us to number 12, which is a lot of designers don’t empower their clients. And the biggest way to do that is to educate them. So firstly talk at their level, and then educate your clients on all of those little things that they need to know you don’t want to overwhelm them. But if your client wants to get on the first page of Google, but they don’t understand what’s involved, don’t look at them and get mad and say like they’re unrealistic, just educate them, let them know. Well, getting on the first page of Google just depends on what term we’re talking about. And you can tell them, there’s different types of terms there is a short tail like dentists, Columbus, Ohio, or there’s long tail like pediatric dentist Grove City, which is a suburb where I am outside of Columbus, Ohio. So you can tell them like there’s a big difference. And just by educating them, you don’t even need to sell, just educate them, that will really make you look like a rock star. And that will build trust, and they’ll be much more likely to buy from you. And to build that client relationship, it’s going to last a long time. So educate your clients, above all, because that will empower them that will empower them, particularly those of those clients who want to run their sites.

Josh 28:34
Number 14. If you neglect previous and current clients, that is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Again, just remember, it’s the old rule of thumb. new clients cost 10 times more than previous clients or current clients. And I found that to be completely true. My focus early on in my career was all about new clients, I was constantly focused on getting new leads and new jobs. And then it dawned on me, I haven’t reached out with any clients that have already worked with. And I never really did any sort of email campaigns with them, or I never really kept in touch very well. Once I started doing that my business changed completely. You know why? Because design clients who I had done designs for previously already knew me, they already liked me and they already trusted me. And a lot of them were willing to spend way more with me either on redesigns on their old sites, or they were open to other services because I was starting to add more value. And that’s the beauty about web design. You don’t need to get a new client every week if you add more value and you really focus on your current clients. So right now I have a challenge for you. Reach out to your previous clients, even if that sounds weird and foreign. And just either get back in touch with them and ask them if they need any assistance with their websites or if they’re looking to get any help with any additional services or maybe if you’re just now doing maintenance or SEO Or any other type of work, reach out to him and say, Hey, we’re offering this now, because you’ll be surprised at how many people will pay you more, because they already know you and you don’t need to sell to them, you don’t need to build that relationship all over again, by focusing on your previous and current clients that you’re working with, you’re going to make your life so much easier. And you’re going to get out of that rat race, that feast and famine of a new client, a new client, a new client done, keep in touch with your previous clients, and really build those relationships and get the most out of those relationships. I know that sounds kind of weird, but get the getting the most out of current clients is the way to go. It’ll save you again so much time and you’ll be able to make more and be more sanity, and you have less clients to manage less clients more money, that’s the way to go.

Josh 30:43
Okay. And finally, the biggest mistake is not building a referral network. A lot of web designers are standoffish towards other web designers or people in similar industries. But I learned about this word called Co Op petition meaning your company your competition can actually be people you cooperate with and you build your network with. For me, as a web designer, I started to surround myself with people in SEO, social media, digital marketing, and they were my best referral partners in every aspect, I was able to send them clients because I didn’t do that area of work. And then they were sending me people who needed web design. So it was really an incredible fruitful, fruitful relationship. And here’s the beauty about a referral network of people that you refer people to, they become your Salesforce. So you can either do less sales yourself, doesn’t that sound nice for those of you who hate sales, or you don’t have to worry about hiring somebody or doing all these other marketing campaigns, when you have people in your referral network, who are constantly getting leads for web design, for example, that will send them to you. And as long as you keep on sending them, the clients who need social media or whatever it is, I promise you, it’s going to be incredible, fruitful relationship. But the trick is you got to be intentional about it, you got to build your network, you can do that online and Facebook groups. Again, I mentioned I have a membership. Now if you’re curious about that, if that sounds, this is my membership is not for everybody, I will say it’s for people who are serious about their business. So if you’re brand new web designer, you might not be at that level yet. But if your business is going and you’re really really ready to take all this seriously, go to Josh hall.co/membership. And that will take you to the details because that’s exactly what that is. That is a built in World Class referral network, so you don’t go it alone. And you’re automatically in a place where you have these incredible referral sources. So do that. Again, you can do it online, but you can also do it locally, you can do it with a chamber of commerce, you can do it with networking groups, you can do it with meetups, there’s tons of different avenues for building a referral network, but find people you know, like and trust, who feel like they’re gonna do good work for your clients. And again, it will be very reciprocal. If you give them leads, they’ll give you leads and building referral network is one of the best ways to get ahead.

Josh 32:58
So there you go guys, those are the top 15 biggest mistakes that I’ve either experienced myself or I’ve seen most web designers do. And those are my tips on how to avoid those. I hope you find this helpful. Leave a comment on the post if you have any more that you would I’m always open to hear and other mistakes or any any thoughts on the podcast you can go to Josh hall.co/093 and leave a comment on the post let me know if there’s any more or just let me know this helped you out because I want to help you avoid these big mistakes like I made so you can expedite your journey and enjoy every day doing what you’re doing building websites. Hope you guys love this one. see on the next episode and again here is to like making less mistakes as a web designer and hopefully these solutions will help you avoid them in the future. Cheers guys see in the next episode.