Web Designer – What Does It Really Mean?

North Country Design features talented website designers with a combined 40 years of experience using WordPress as a content management system (CMS), our team has worked together on dozens of projects for small business owners in the United States and Canada. Whether you need a fast 5-page website to help customers learn more about your small business or establish a complete corporate online identity, our team is ready to design your web site and ensure that you’re able to get the results that you expect in a quality website design company.

The following text was originally featured on Smashing Magazine’s blog.

We’re Not ONLY Web Designers

One of the biggest misconceptions about designers (and usually Web designers) is that we’re just Web designers — that the scope of our skills begins with Lorem ipsum and ends with HTML emails. This is ridiculous.

Everyone in this industry fills dozens of roles throughout a given day. On a call with a prospective client, we take the role of salesperson. After the contract is sorted, we become researchers, combing through the client’s outdated website, looking at analytics and identifying breakdowns and room for improvement. Soon after, we become content curators, wading through the piles of content in PDF format sent by the client, identifying what works and what doesn’t.

Then we’re architects, laying out content to get the most important messages across, while ensuring that everything in our layouts remains findable. We design the website itself. We manage client expectations and work through revisions. We write code. We introduce a content management system. We carefully insert and style content. We create and update the brand’s presence on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. We help to create an editorial calendar to keep content fresh and accurate. We check in on the analytics and metrics to see how the website is performing.

Notice that “design” is mentioned only once in all of that work.

Ok, Shawn’s turn.

As a website designer who finds himself wearing many hats, this story hits the nail directly on the head for me. I’ve never really stopped to think about exactly how many hats I’m expected to wear when someone calls my office. In any one given conversation I can be advising someone on the angle for their press release and in the very next breath asked to add chat functionality to their web site. Oh … and how much would I charge to put together some postcards for a quick mailing due next week

I’m blessed with having a broad skill set. I can produce printed marketing materials, digital marketing materials, write content for social media and blog posts, and develop programs to assist small business owners. I doubt most clients would enjoy working with 6 different companies or even worse, specialty firms who only dealt with one very particular aspect of the project. 

Another benefit of calling North Country Design – when you call my office, I’ll be the one answering the call, not a random employee from a call center. I know each one of my clients in the professional sense. I establish relationships with them and some have been working with me for over 10 years on improving their business online.

At the end of the day, it’s all about multi-tasking and project management. I’ve found that utilizing some basic tools really helps me juggle the day-to-day business affairs for North Country Design. My white board is always updated a few times each day during production meetings. I write everything in one subject notebooks. Each notebook contains my day to day notes, conversation notes, email print outs and etc. helps me stay organized. I can easily flip back through pages to review previous conversations – and while it might be more fitting for me to have this in a digital format, I find the ease of use of the notebook quite handy.