By: web design tutorial | posted in Personal, Web Design |
Date: August 20th, 2009
I like to think of myself as an easy going and a positive type of person most of the time, but today has been a bad day for me. I’m not here to wine and moan about this, I don’t like hearing that from other people so you won’t hear it from me. I just want to give my insight on this issue about the World’s Best Web Designer from .Net Magazine.
How It Got Started
In the past few days, especially today I had been pretty busy with my freelance work and personal work. I got emails and msn messages from past clients asking me about updates, new clients asking for quotes, I have deadlines for my current projects due. All that comes before I can even work on my current project that I need to finish soon.
All that work and time while I am still trying to get my name out there, marketing my business and myself.
Is this the right direction for me?
The latest issue of .Net magazine has this article about “The World’s Top 20 Web Designers” – but how they determine these people are the best web designers? To me it look more like their list of the “best 20 web designers” in the industry, but it rather just be the most popular web designers. Just because you are popular in the web design community, it doesn’t mean you are the best web designers.
Try to think of a famous web designer at the moment, you know.. the same person that speaks at the same conferences over and over again. Most of them don’t even design web sites every day, they just run their business. They are also have good understanding about HTML5 and CSS3 and other web design codes, but they spend more time talking about them than applying that knowledge.
A lot of the people I lookup in this industry are not the same ones at the forefront of innovation on the web. It seem like many of the web design companies out there are not too worry about getting a lot of recognition in the industry and they are doing very well. Their main focus for these companies and agencies are not marketing, social media, just web design. As far as the world’s best web designer (a single person) is pretty much unknown.
Here’s my point
How many of you heard of a web design studio named WebHeads? They are not very famous in the web design industry, but check out their website and see the list of their clients. Just to name a few: Intel, BBC, Daily Mirror, Mercedes, Texaco, Cisco, Planet Hollywood, and The NHS.
Now go back and revisit the .Net “The World’s Top 20 Web Designers” and see which one of those top web designers have a list of clients like WebHeads? To my knowledge, none of them.
Why is that you ask?
What are my goals?
One of the thing that I always wanted in this industry is to “become well known in the industry”, but today I am wondering if that is worth it. All the design studios out there don’t need to fight each other on blogs, or why CSS frameworks are “morally wrong”. They all don’t need to write a magazine article proclaiming how big their balls are.
They simple just say, “Hi Sony, yes we can manage all your web design projects and your multi million dollar budget for all your web design work.” “Oh what was that? You like our last web design work with Samsung? Well, we will make it better on your web sites.”
No BS what so ever. A big client list is very impressive, it says a lot about you. If these big companies trust you with their websites than you can too.
Conclusion
There are many things that are being overlook. Just because you are a well known web designer in the industry doesn’t put you in the category of the BEST or even good. Also, it does not make you have a successfully business, just because you are good at marketing yourself. To prove you my point here are some of the most successful web design companies currently:
- 1. Syzygy $22,358,000
- 2. Conchango $21,200,000
- 3. Reading Room $16,834,000
- 4. Red Bee Media $15,747,000
When was the last time you saw anyone of these companies on the .Net, or any other web designer related magazines? Most likely never.
I am not saying all the magazines and the discussions are irrelevant, but I am saying these people on the .Net magazine are not the BEST, I think we give them too much credit.
By: web design tutorial
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