Starting a web design business is an exciting venture that allows you to turn your passion for design into a lucrative career. This list has helped me single handedly go from a part-time graphic design position at a company headed nowhere, to a robust well oiled agency of a machine. In this guide, we’ll take you through the essential steps of launching your own web design agency, from defining your services to building a remote team. We’ve got you covered, so keep reading to learn how to start a web design agency!
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Here’s what we’re covering in this post:
•The ultimate checklist to launch your agency
•What web design services to offer
•How to write Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s)
•Creating multiple streams of income
•Building a team for your business
When creating your Web Design Agency, you have to start at the top with some key tasks to get things going. Things like choosing a niche that you’re passionate about, picking your agency name, and of course designing your brand and logo! You’ll also want to purchase your domain name, and be sure to secure your WordPress hosting.
Passionate Niches: Start by choosing a niche that aligns with your passion. This ensures that your work is driven by your genuine interest and expertise.
Branding: Design a compelling logo and establish your brand identity, including color schemes, typography, and other visual elements. Our clients love the brands we’ve designed, and how they’ve positioned their business as experts. This will soon be you!
Domain and Hosting: Purchase a domain name that reflects your agency and will stand the test of time. Secure reliable WordPress hosting to ensure a smooth online presence.
At BelaMarca Studio we use a step-by-step itemized checklist that has helped us to close all of our clients. This checklist covers each step needed to launch your agency, plus all the steps to complete each segment of your client’s projects, and a list of quality assurance checkpoints to make sure you nail each project and execute stellar service delivery. You’re going to want to download this so you can get started asap! View the PDF download below.
Now it’s time to decide on your services. For a Web Design Agency, services will include Branding, UI/UX design, WordPress Web Design and Development. Here’s a breakdown of what you can include in those services:
Branding: Brand identity is the visual representation of your brand. It includes elements like color, typography, and logo aesthetics that reflect your business identity and distinguish your brand in your client’s minds. This service could include: market research, Logo design, social media collateral, brand guidelines, business cards Etc.
UI/UX: UX refers to the term User Experience Design, while UI design stands for User Interface Design. Both elements are crucial to a product and work closely together. These Services could include: sketching, wireframes, interface architecture, use of Figma and/or Adobe XD.
WordPress Web Design: this is our focus here at BelaMarca Studio. Create an online home for your client to showcase their skills and products, while answering questions for their clients and generating leads. Include wordpress hosting as a service to increase your monetization. Services would include: wireframe design, WordPress design using Elementor, Analytics integration, custom website development, desktop and mobile responsive websites.
Now that you know which services that you want to offer, you will want to create Standard Operating Procedures (SOP’s) to help you stay organized and streamlined. These are step-by-step processes to help you streamline and delegate your efforts. You want to have these processes in place so as you grow, you’re not inundated with workload and you can have the free time to focus on gaining clients and increasing your streams of income.
They’re pretty easy to make. In a Google Doc, you’ll write out all the steps it takes you to complete a task from start to finish. Then place that document on the left side of the screen, then open up a screen recorder like Loom or OBS, and on the right stride of the screen record yourself carrying out those tasks in a way that you can easily share this with your future team members. To learn more about how to set up an entire library of standard operating procedures for your business, read this article.
Web design agency owners have a mindset of “if I don’t have clients, then I can’t make income, I can’t create wealth for my business, and I can’t scale.” If that resonates with you, then what you have to do is think of possible ways that you can leverage passive income streams in your web design agency. There’s a few ways to do that.
One way is you can create templates and digital products that you can resell. By this point you’ve already created your systems and standard operating procedures to delegate these processes. Now what you can do is you can package up your process and sell that to other agency owners or freelancers or people in your space that are looking to grow and develop their skills. You can leverage that by charging them money to get instant access to your processes.
For example, things like brand identity, collateral visual assets, online courses, you can create templates and resell them on online markets such as ThemeForest, CreativeMarket, Envato etc. You can even do it on your own site using WooCommerce or Gumroad. But ultimately you want to start visualizing how you can take your skill set and create digital products that you can then resell.
Once you’ve reached your capacity of managing projects, you need to decide which roles you need to fulfill. You’ll also need to have a thorough plan in place to guide and train your new team members. Thankfully, that should be easy since you’ve already outlined all your processes in your SOP library. You’ll need to clearly define your job requirements, so create a list of deliverables and specifics, and be willing to pay more to get more. It’s difficult to find really good people, but it’s absolutely possible. What you want to look at is cost, location, their talent, their skill set, the language barrier, which is important, as well as experience. If you wanna scale this business, you have to hire.
A huge piece of advice would be to consider hiring offshore talent (professional individuals that work remotely overseas). It’s an option that’ll allow you to complete a lot of projects for an affordable cost. If you’re paying a little bit higher than competitors, you’ll get above average individuals that really crush it. At BelaMarca Studio, I am the Creative Director overseeing everything and making sure everything looks up to par before it goes out to clients. And if you’re just starting out and want to scale without breaking the bank, you can always bootstrap by offshoring your repetitive tasks. Keep in mind, we’re not necessarily suggesting outsourcing, or giving this to someone else to handle. You’re more so creating the process, and giving that to someone to execute. And that is what we call offshoring. If you’d like to learn more about how to build a remote team for your web design business, read this article.
Related Article: How To Build A Remote Team For Your Business
These are the fundamentals to building your agency. You have all the tools to start. You may or may not be able to get this up and running in 30 days, but remember that it takes time and there will be bumps along the way. But you don’t have to go through all the trial and error like other agency’s have. There’s a way to fast track your progress…
Imagine if you could get step-by-step help to launch a PROFITABLE web design studio, delegate your work, and travel the world while your business runs itself? What if you could get access to 30+ internal video training videos to provide to an affordable team to scale your efforts instantly? How insane would it be if you could get access to an entire Google Doc Suite of job templates, workflow docs, email templates, job description templates and more? If this is a must for you than you’ve got to dive in to the Web Design Studio Accelerator Course!
what's included
Video Lessons
You get access to the EXACT training videos and lessons we use to train staff, delegate tasks and free up time to focus on the big picture. It's the blueprint, from prospecting all the way to closing recurring revenue.
Source Files
The entire FOLDER of all source files including branding guidelines, logo templates, website design files, social media collateral, and so much more organized & prepped in Figma for you to use.
Docs / SOPs
Everything you would ever need is ready to go. You get the video trainings, step-by-step directions, the itemized lists and the Google Sheets we use to deliver award-winning website designs to clients.
Ready to grow your
web design studio?
Download this step-by-step itemized checklist that covers each step needed to launch your agency. Plus all the steps to complete each segment of your client projects, and a list of quality assurance points so you nail each project delivery.
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