What Does a Web Designer Do? 10 Things to Know

This guide describes my WordPress process. I now build with Astro, with content writing included in Rebuild and Grow. See how I work today.

When you’re thinking about hiring a freelance web designer, you’re looking for someone with a spread of skills: marketing, basic SEO, graphic design and communication. In many ways the ideal freelance web designer is a ‘Jack of All Trades’ with an established history of exceeding client expectations. Here are 10 areas you can use to assess a web designer, and to learn how many different things come together in small business web design.

1. Communication Skills

A web designer’s communication skills are on show from the first contact. Whether you reach out to them or they reach out to you, the way they write or talk starts to show you what working with them would be like. Do they speak only in technical jargon? Do their technical questions leave you feeling out of your depth? Do they actively listen when you explain your business and your goals for the website? An active listener isn’t using the time you spend talking to plan a reply that steers attention back to their own agenda. They respond to what has actually been said, and the speaker (the client, in this case) comes away feeling listened to. If a web designer takes over the conversation and leaves the client feeling nothing relevant has been said, that’s an early red flag. It points to weak communication skills and makes communication problems during the project more likely. That matters even more on a large project.

Setting clear communication expectations

Each web designer has a preferred way to communicate. Some prefer email, others WhatsApp or a phone call. As a client, look at whether the designer sets clear expectations. Knowing their office hours helps, for example. More and more people understand the health and productivity benefits of reading emails only at set points in the day. So it’s fine not to expect a reply within the hour. What makes a real difference is the designer setting expectations, such as “I aim to reply to all client emails within 24 hours. I check my emails twice a day: once in the morning and once in the afternoon. I find this helps me stay focussed.” Good communication works both ways, of course, and your designer should explain when and how they’ll need to hear from you. That isn’t the designer being dictatorial. It’s a professional showing good leadership: making clear when project milestones matter, agreeing with you how you’ll communicate throughout the project, and respecting each other’s deadlines.

2. Share their years of experience

One difference between a web designer who charges £90 per website and one who charges £2,000 per website is the experience they draw on. There’s a popular meme among creatives reminding clients that the price covers the experience and training behind the work as well as the hours spent on your project. So, in exchange for your money, you’d expect them to share and draw on that experience. In my experience there’s no end to the questions a web design client can ask. I love spending the time to talk clients through their ideas and blend them with industry best practice, in both the visual design and the code behind the pages. How well a designer answers these questions, drawing on past projects as they go, is a good reflection of their experience and of how easily they communicate with clients.

3. Cut through the jargon

No one likes being spoken down to, but a stream of technical jargon and techno-babble can leave you feeling exactly that. Still, a web designer needs to communicate well and draw on experience, and how they express it can’t be overlooked. In your first conversations, it’s up to the web designer to gauge your technical knowledge and adapt their language to suit. Have they found a way of talking that informs you without going over your head? You expect your web designer to have a firm grip on the technologies that fall under web design and web development, so they can build your website with confidence and look after it once it’s live. But remember why you’re hiring them: for their technical knowledge and their ability to take care of the work. Once the designer has judged how involved and experienced a client is, they can involve that client as much or as little as the client wants. Some clients will expect their web designer to unpack and explain things like DNS, SMTP and cookies. Explaining them clearly and confidently is the mark of a designer’s experience and communication skills.

4. Website content coaching and support

Unless a web designer specifically says they provide copywriting, they’re probably not offering to write your content for you. My view is that, short of bringing in a professional copywriter, small business owners are in the best position to write about their business. But many aren’t sure where to start, and they need support to think strategically about the key content for their web pages. I believe a web designer can help by offering a content collection workbook that guides the business owner through structuring content that will turn visitors into customers or clients. I give my clients a Google Doc workbook that takes them through each page, and each section of a page, that will appear in the final design. Over a video call we go through the workbook together and I explain the purpose and reasoning behind the content structure I’ve devised. For the navigation or menu bar, and for the content above the fold (what a visitor sees in their web browser before they have to scroll), my workbook asks the business owner to think about the user experience they want to create. If visitors leave without taking the next step, the website may be losing business. Often that’s the result of a poorly designed and structured website. Visitors decide in a split second whether the content is relevant to them. If it isn’t, they’re off to the next Google result. Good web design brings bite-sized key, or cornerstone, content above the fold and into the visitor’s eye-line.

5. Graphic design

Graphic design is a role and profession in its own right. But as with many of these skills, an eye for design and knowing the key tools and web design software matter just as much for a web designer. A website can be perfectly developed on the backend, with every other vital element in place, and still lose you customers through frustration and miscommunication if its design doesn’t reflect your business professionally. A good web designer draws on graphic design skills to build a website that represents your brand accurately and instils trust in your industry. Not every website will be as minimalist as a lawyer’s or as creative as an artist’s or photographer’s. Your web designer should make sure the design fits the business’s future goals and the clients or customers it hopes to attract. This is known as creating a visual design language. It can be done in Adobe Photoshop, for example, or directly on a web server as part of a live build using WordPress page builders like Elementor, Divi or Oxygen Builder.

Colour theory

Web designers should have a basic understanding of colour theory. For example, how to use colour to draw attention to parts of a website such as ‘call to action’ buttons, whilst keeping the website accessible for visitors with accessibility needs such as colour blindness, or who use inverted screens or screen readers.

6. Web Development

Most web designers would call themselves creatives and designers before coders. But over 10 years of experience in web design has taught me that knowing the basics of HTML, JavaScript, CSS and PHP is useful when building a website for a particular business. The more websites I’ve built for clients, the more CSS I’ve had to pick up. To my mind, web developers are incredibly experienced across a range of programming languages, and without them none of the actual code behind every web page would be written or work. Even so, knowing the basics is essential to customising and delivering a client’s website. I’d encourage any web designer just starting out to take one of the free HTML and CSS front-end developer courses available.

7. User experience

What does a visitor see first when they land on your homepage? Where do you want to guide them? Perhaps to a contact form or a newsletter sign-up. A web designer has to take on the role and responsibilities of a UX (user experience) designer too. A beautiful website can still let you down if you haven’t thought about what visitors need to do on it. UX design puts your business goals at the heart of every element on a web page. If you want visitors to sign up for a newsletter, make that clear and keep the user’s path unhindered. If capturing new leads is your number one goal, how easy is it to find your contact form, and is the form easy to fill in and submit? In a Discovery Call, I help a business owner create user personas by working out who their target audience is in detail. A simple brochure website, for example, may have two key audiences. First, new customers who find the website and use it to understand the services or products on offer. Second, returning customers or clients who want to find out more about the business or make a second purchase. The interface you use as a client matters too. Does your web designer build with software that lets you edit your own website? Of the many options, including Webflow, Wix and Squarespace, I keep going back to WordPress because it’s such a flexible content management system. If a client already manages their own social media accounts, I find they can be taught to edit a website in WordPress.

8. A responsive web designer

Some estimates say around 50%, if not more, of web traffic now comes from mobile devices rather than desktop or laptop web browsers. One approach was to build separate versions for desktop and mobile users. With additions and advances in CSS, a single website that responds to different screen sizes now does the job. Responsive web design, as it’s known, combines flexible widths, stacking columns and breakpoints at certain widths to keep your website readable and well laid out at every screen size. Browsers now come in all shapes and screen sizes. Just think about the range of sizes and aspect ratios on handheld mobile devices alone. In my web design process, responsive design comes near the end of the build. It’s the best way I’ve found to establish a strong, consistent design from page to page that my client has approved. Then I go through and adjust each page and template, testing on a range of screen sizes.

9. Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is another broad term. It covers using the internet, social media, search engines and other methods to reach consumers. At heart, your website is a digital marketing channel. So it makes sense that the web designer who guides you through creating your content, builds the new design and launches your website should have digital marketing experience. For a digital marketer, UX design, web design and graphic design come together to give each of your website’s visitors the best possible experience. Check that your web designer has your business’s goals in mind with every creative decision they make.

10. SEO Strategist

SEO is short for search engine optimisation and is usually split into two groups: on-site and off-site SEO. A web designer will focus on putting industry-standard best practice in place for on-site SEO. An optimised website relies on the combined effect of many small improvements to its Google ranking. A web designer with basic SEO knowledge will structure the page HTML and build in meta descriptions, which gives your website a head start. Site maps are another behind-the-scenes basic a web designer should include. They guide search engines as they index your website.

Talk about your website

If you’re choosing a web designer and want to talk through what your business needs, get in touch for an informal conversation.