What Web Designers Actually Do

Maintaining your own site, case studies, and presence to attract clients in the first place.

Finding leads, cold outreach, networking, referral cultivation — none of this runs itself.

Understanding what the client actually needs, which is rarely what they say they need.

Defining exactly what is and isn't included before a single pixel is touched.

Documenting approach, timeline, deliverables, and pricing in a way that protects everyone.

Legal documents covering IP ownership, kill fees, revision limits, payment terms, NDA.

Deposits, milestone billing, late fees, chasing overdue invoices.

Who is actually visiting this site? What do they need, fear, and want to do?

What are the client's competitors doing well or badly? Where's the differentiation?

What does success actually look like? Leads? Sales? Phone calls? Email signups?

WordPress vs. Webflow vs. Shopify vs. custom — and the honest tradeoffs of each.

Helping clients understand what $800 gets vs. $8,000 — and why those are different products.

When the client's boss, spouse, or business partner suddenly has opinions about the design.

What pages exist, how they relate, what lives where — before any design begins.

How users move through the site. Primary nav, secondary nav, footer nav, breadcrumbs.

Tracing the paths a user takes from landing to conversion and removing friction.

What information is most important on each page? What do users see first, second, third?

Clean, logical, SEO-friendly URLs that also make sense to humans. Not /page?id=447.

What happens when something breaks or a URL moves? Dead ends kill conversions.

Chasing clients for logos, photos, bios, and copy. Often the longest part of any project.

Headlines, body copy, CTAs, microcopy — words that actually convert, not just fill space.

Stock photography, licensing compliance, avoiding copyright infringement.

Resizing, compressing, and formatting images so pages load in under 3 seconds.

Describing images for screen readers and search engines. Required, not optional.

What shows up in browser tabs, search results, and social sharing previews.

Editorial calendars, topic clusters, content that attracts organic search traffic over time.

Using (or creating) logos, color palettes, fonts, and voice consistently throughout.

Low-fidelity layout sketches to validate structure before investing in visual design.

High-fidelity comps for client approval before a single line of code is written.

Selecting, pairing, and sizing type so it's readable, hierarchical, and on-brand.

Primary, secondary, and neutral palettes. Accessibility contrast ratios. Dark mode.

Designing for every screen size from 320px to 2560px, and everything in between.

Communicating design decisions to non-designers and incorporating feedback gracefully.

Clean, semantic, standards-compliant front-end code that browsers can actually interpret.

Installing, configuring, and securing WordPress, Webflow, or any other platform from scratch.

Making a template not look like a template. This is never drag-and-drop.

Selecting, configuring, and keeping plugins updated without breaking other things.

Calculators, booking systems, dynamic content, anything that doesn't come out of the box.

Testing and fixing layout/function issues in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and mobile browsers.

Caching, lazy loading, minification, CDN configuration — getting Google PageSpeed above 90.

Keyboard navigation, screen reader support, ARIA labels. A legal requirement for many businesses.

Securing the right domain, avoiding predatory registrars, managing renewal and ownership.

A records, CNAMEs, MX records, TXT records — the plumbing the internet runs on.

Shared vs. VPS vs. cloud, server location, resource requirements, uptime guarantees.

Installing and renewing SSL. Without it, browsers warn visitors your site is "not secure."

php.ini, .htaccess, file permissions, environment variables. Not glamorous, entirely necessary.

Cloudflare or similar — faster global delivery, DDoS protection, caching layer.

A separate test server where changes can be tested before touching the live site.

Automated backups to offsite storage. The thing everyone ignores until they desperately need it.

Configuring name@yourbusiness.com via Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or cPanel.

The DNS records that tell the internet where to deliver email for your domain.

Authentication records that prevent your legitimate email from landing in spam folders.

Forms that actually send email, filter spam, and land in the right inbox reliably.

Connecting Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or similar — list signups, automations, deliverability.

Order confirmations, password resets, booking notifications — the emails that must never fail.

Changing default usernames, blocking exploit paths, hiding version info, limiting login attempts.

Ongoing monitoring and rules that catch threats before they become catastrophes.

Cookie consent banners, privacy policies, data collection disclosures — legal requirements, not suggestions.

Legally required documentation drafted or sourced and kept current.

Keeping bots from filling forms, creating fake accounts, and polluting analytics.

Who can publish, edit, or delete? Least-privilege access protects against accidents and attacks.

The majority of WordPress hacks happen through outdated plugins. Someone has to stay on top of this.

What terms do real people type to find businesses like this? Not guesses — data.

Title tags, meta descriptions, header hierarchy, internal linking, image alt text.

Crawlability, indexability, structured data, canonical tags, page speed, mobile usability.

Telling search engines what to crawl and what to ignore. Required for proper indexing.

Submitting the site, monitoring indexing status, catching crawl errors early.

Google Business Profile, NAP consistency, local citations, map pack optimization.

Markup that helps search engines display rich results: reviews, hours, FAQs, products.

Google Analytics 4, Plausible, or similar — properly configured, not just the code dropped in.

Tracking form submissions, phone clicks, purchases — events that actually measure business outcomes.

A container that manages all tracking scripts cleanly without cluttering the codebase.

Meta Pixel, Google Ads tag — required for any paid advertising retargeting to function.

Hotjar or similar — seeing what real users actually do, not what you assumed they'd do.

Turning data into insight. Numbers without context are just noise.

Hours, prices, staff, products, events — a website is never "done."

Regular updates that must be tested, not blindly applied, or things break.

Getting alerted when a site goes down at 3am so it doesn't stay down until the client notices.

The internet changes. Links rot. Pages move. Someone has to keep the site from going stale.

Sites slow down over time as content and plugins accumulate. Regular tuning is required.

Teaching clients how to update their own content without inadvertently destroying things.

When the site gets hacked, the plugin update breaks everything, or someone deletes the database.