Poll: Are we on the brink of a design revolution?

In the last couple of years we’ve noticed more and more websites following the same basic format. This is typically referred to as design convergence; two designers, approaching the same problem, might reasonably arrive at the same solution—even more so, if they’re aware of each other’s work.

It’s common to hear complaints from designers (rarely clients) that all sites look the same, and that web design has become “boring”. But another word for “boring” is “predictable”, and predictable is good for users.

Design patterns stick, because they work

Design convergence is a process driven by widespread adoption of design patterns. At some point, cobblers decided that the best way to secure a shoe to a foot was laces—yes, other types of fastening are available, but most footwear uses laces. Those cobblers didn’t hold some kind of clandestine meeting, over time cobblers who didn’t favor laces either found another niche, or went out of business. Design patterns stick, because they work.

As an industry, we’ve been here before. From Web 2.0, to Flat Design, via Splash pages, every design solution is definitive until it’s surpassed. Inevitably, technology moves on, and as the question changes, the answer changes too. However, despite the continuing march of technology the current crop of design patterns has proved to be unusually persistent.

Part of the reason is that business (always blame the client) is heavily invested in current solutions; we might also blame the design community, blogs (such as this one), Medium, Dribbble, all reinforce a status quo; we might also blame our own expectations, I recently caught myself referring to Material Design—a whole two years old—as “dated” (because it is). We’re acutely aware of design trends, we’re always looking for the next idea, and a watched pot never boils.

Still, the one characteristic of every revolution is that it is preceded by a period of stagnation. The current design convergence may be the maturation of design patterns that will continue for decades, or it may be we’re about to experience another momentous change in the design landscape.

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How Much is Bad Data Costing Your Company?

In a world of big data, bad data is becoming more and more commonplace. Part of the issue is fueled by the technology we use to help manage and organize that data. In our rush to be more on-demand, personalized and data-science-powered, we’ve embraced cloud computing, mobility, social collaboration and enhanced analytics. Every scrap of every shred of customer data is valuable. But in doing so, we’ve also let our data quality control lapse.

And when departments are clamoring for numbers despite the inaccuracies, it leads to a ripple effect of poor decisions based on those errors. But just how much is it really costing us? And what can we do to stop poor data hygiene before it spreads? Let’s take a closer look:

A Company Problem – Not Just an IT Problem

Even just a few years ago, in 2013, the looming spectre of bad data was apparent. Gartner surveyed a wide range of companies in its study and learned that data quality costs them over $14 million dollars a year. Now imagine how much more connected we are today and you can see how the problem could compound exponentially.

Source: Ringlead

Many companies, in an attempt to wrangle departments to make sense of it all, place the task of organizing and managing all this information squarely on IT’s shoulders. But bad data affects more than just servers and databases – it affects everyone. In this day and age, it is very much a business problem.

And that’s not even factoring in the cost beyond customer data. A few inaccuracies in customer names or details is one thing. But oftentimes, depending on the company culture in relation to data upkeep, it can affect other areas of business as well – productivity, security and making cost effective decisions.

In short, this is not a problem we can continue to throw money at and hope it goes away or works itself out.

What Exactly Is “Data Quality”?

Before you begin to get a handle on the data itself, it’s important to understand what “it” is. According to another Gartner study, data quality is examined by several different points, including:

• Existence (does the organization have the data to begin with?)
• Validity (are the values acceptable?)
• Consistency (when the same piece of data is stored in different locations, do they have the same values?)
• Integrity (how accurate the relationships between data elements and data sets are)
• Accuracy (whether the data accurately describes the properties of the object it is meant to model)
• Relevance (whether or not the data is appropriate to support the objective)

That’s a lot of information to try and clean up “by hand”.

A Portfolio of Options

To help meet the rising urgency of this challenge, there are many data cleansing solutions available. These companies typically look at the big picture of data quality and help to standardize records as a whole. They often source data internally and externally to help maximize relevance and consistency across the board.

As with the other tools in your business arsenal, it’s a smart idea to have a portfolio of options available for your data cleansing needs. You may only need a one-time data cleanse to keep your information up-to-date, or you may need ongoing work. Ideally, you’d only need a one-time data quality cleanup if you’re migrating to another system or doing a mass marketing campaign. Otherwise if the information isn’t tended to often, it can deteriorate and compound problems considerably.

For particularly large or error-prone data sets, a data quality cleansing tool may be set up to run automatically. These types of systems can either cleanse data at specific intervals or notify managers and staff in cases where ongoing data quality monitoring is important.

What to Look For in a Data Quality Solution Provider

Because there are so many options available, and more tools being created all the time, it can feel overwhelming to try and narrow down your options when you’re not even really sure what you need. No matter what you ultimately decide, the proposed solution absolutely must be able to:

• Be able to deliver an immediate impact and noticeable improvement based on the company’s current data hygiene state
• Leverage both real-time information and historical details – customers, staff, products, techniques and processes
• Have a rock-solid foundation to be able to use new technologies such as predictive analytics, forecasting and modeling
• Scale and adapt based on the volume, speed and variety of data while keeping everything valid and consistent

And just as the cost of bad data can continue to multiply year over year, the savings from having accurate data are just as big (if not more-so), as noted in this chart from RingLead:

Source: Ringlead

What a Difference Clean Data Can Make!

Of course, cost savings are one thing, but oftentimes management (and other executives) don’t just want savings – they want to see a direct correlation in terms of revenue as well. The real question is, how much can clean data make for us? Here’s a hypothetical (albeit very realistic) example from the same Ringlead chart:

And in addition to revenues and savings, the benefits of clean data go much farther. With greater data reliability comes greater credibility and a stronger decision-making foundation backed by data. Reports become more accurate. Customers respond to more accurate personalization. All departments enjoy greater productivity and efficiency. It’s a cycle of wins.

So as you can see, a few inaccurate records or non-standardized entries don’t seem like a big problem, but as your business scales, more and more information becomes fragmented and fraught with issues. Costs escalate. Efficiency plummets. But by the same token, by spending a little now, you reap far greater benefits over time. And any campaign started or improved based on solid, reliable information is one you can look to time and time again for greater insights and metrics that count.

Do you use a data hygiene strategy in your own company? How has it worked out for you? Have you seen better performance as a result or is the jury still out when it comes to making an impact? Share your stories with us in the comments below.

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today! Follow @sherice on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ for more articles like this!

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Web technologies that (thankfully) died

Hard as it is to believe, it’s been over 20 years since the World Wide Web has become a mainstream part of our collective culture. It has played a major part in changing how we communicate and how we work. There aren’t many aspects of our lives that haven’t been changed by the web and its seemingly limitless collection of information.

As for designers, we’re certainly thankful for the role the web has played in our lives. It has provided us with a means to make a good living, after all.

But, the web can be a very trend-obsessed place, especially when it comes to technology. It has always been difficult to keep up with all the latest must-have bells and whistles that clients are asking for (even if they weren’t so great). The past is littered with examples of gimmicky “features” that we implemented and limited technologies we’ve had to work around.

Here are a few of those items that were once all the rage. In hindsight, they turned out to be clunky technologies that were once a necessary part of our job. While you might still find a few examples of them in the wild, they are rapidly becoming extinct.

Proprietary code and formats

Back in the 1990’s, as use of the web was rapidly growing, companies were aiming to create websites that were more entertaining and consumer-friendly. There were a plethora of new browser plugins and companion software that allowed for this. What stood out, though, was that a lack of standards meant most of this technology was closed and proprietary.

Microsoft looks to win the browser wars

When Microsoft Internet Explorer launched back in August of 1995, its main competitor was the upstart Netscape Navigator. The software giant from Washington State was looking to put Netscape out of business and dominate the market share for browsers.

Among their many ideas was to create proprietary, non-standard HTML that would work only in IE. That led to sites that could look radically different in other browsers. As it turned out, many designers weren’t keen on using code that rendered their site useless (or just plain ugly) for a significant chunk of users.

Multimedia choices

Both video and audio formats used to be a complete mess. Well before HTML5 standards allowed browsers to handle multimedia on their own, there were a bevy of proprietary formats and software needed to watch or listen to anything.

Setting up a site with any of this content meant you had to choose between competing formats. Plugins for QuickTime, RealAudio/RealVideo, and Windows Media Player were among the most-used. And, of course, they were in no way compatible with each other. So whichever formats you posted to a site, the end user had to have compatible software installed to access the content. What’s worse, using the RealAudio/RealVideo platform meant you’d have to install a server-side software package to enable multiple, simultaneous streams. This made live events quite costly.

Much of this also came at a time when broadband connections weren’t so common. While software companies boasted about their product’s ability to work well with very little bandwidth, the quality of streaming media was generally poor. Videos were tiny and pixelated, while audio (especially live streaming audio) sounded on par with a cheap AM radio.

Interesting side note: My first ever online purchase was for the “premium” version of the RealPlayer. It promised the use of high-end codecs that improved the quality of streaming content. That said, I didn’t notice any improvement. Maybe that 56k modem had something to do with it…

Flash

I know, Flash is still used a bit for video. But there was a time when Flash was the go-to platform for interactive media and animation. Just about any site that wanted animation, games, audio or video players would use the format.

Flash, in general, had a couple of fatal flaws:

1. Flash content was expensive and time-consuming to create

If you wanted to create original Flash content, you needed to buy an expensive software package (first from the original maker, Macromedia, then Adobe). It was several hundred dollars and had regular upgrades that weren’t so cheap, either.

The software itself was quite powerful. But it also featured a fairly steep learning curve. You needed a good bit of patience to create content because it could be a very long and drawn-out process. Simple animations that may have run in a user’s browser for 10 seconds may have taken a couple of hours to create.

Many a designer said a nasty word or two under their breath whenever a client requested some Flash content.

2. Flash was often relied upon too heavily

Remember the Flash intro? How about sites that were built entirely in Flash? Don’t get me wrong, there were some marvellously creative implementations of the format. But, in the wrong hands, it became a completely user-unfriendly way to create a website.

It almost became a way to dictate to users exactly what you wanted them to do, rather than letting them decide for themselves. Looking back, fatal flaw #1 probably led to #2. Designers knew they could charge a good bit of money for Flash development and so they sold it… often.

Flash eventually took on a new life as the preferred video platform for YouTube. However, Apple’s famous stance of not allowing Flash to run on iOS devices made that comeback rather short-lived. The Flash software’s legacy still lives on in the form of Adobe Animate CC.

Large static sites

Back in the day, a content management system (CMS) was something often custom built for a large corporation. That meant a lot of websites were built using good old-fashioned HTML. And, it could get awfully difficult to maintain.

Thanks to open source CMS like WordPress, Joomla! and Drupal, we can take a lot of things for granted. Humor me as I take you through a couple of mundane things we do each day that used to be a true pain with a static website.

Posting a news article

On a static site you would create a new HTML document using the proper template and add your content. Then, you had to manually add a link to the article in an index page or other listing. If you wanted this article to appear in a sidebar, you might have had to open up a server-side include file and add a link there as well. And don’t forget to upload these changes to the server.

With a CMS, you just add the new content.

Creating a photo gallery

These were so much fun! Let’s say you needed to create a gallery with 100 photos. You would crop and optimize the photos with an image editor (full sized and thumbnail versions), setup an HTML layout (most likely using a table) for the gallery page. Then, you had to either implement a rudimentary script to link thumbnails to full size photos, or create new pages for each photo.

Of course, a good CMS plugin can do all of these things for you while you’re in the next room drinking coffee. Automation is a beautiful thing!

Lest we forget

While the web technologies of yesteryear were often cumbersome, they were also very important precursors to what we have today. If not for the pain points caused by so many proprietary media formats, we may not have the goodness that is HTML5 or other W3C standards in general. The backlash against Flash certainly helped shepherd in the widespread use of minimal design. And the lack of automation from static sites led to the development and democratization of the open source CMS.

Even though the old tech died out (or is really close to it), at least we can say that its existence made things better for us all. The progress we enjoy simply wouldn’t have been possible without them.

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Stop Overspending Time and Money on Marketing Techniques That Don’t Work

I hate to see money wasted on outdated online marketing techniques.

It’s not just about money, but also about time and resources that could be used in a better way. Marketing budgets are often tight, and you just can’t afford to spend them on strategies or things that don’t work.

To help you cut waste and make your marketing strategy more effective, I’ve created a list of six most common ways small and medium sized businesses lose their budgets online. Here’s how to stop overspending time and money, and turn those losses into gains.

1. Using “Guaranteed SEO Services”

SEO is not an exact science and getting results overnight is a myth. Google’s algorithm has become smarter and smarter in the last years and there are no easy shortcuts. It’s commonly known that Google uses hundreds of ranking factors, but the truth is that no one knows precisely what all of those are. With time, you get to learn what techniques work better, but anyone that offers guarantees to rank a site on the 1st position for a particular keyword is a scammer.

Google warns people not to buy SEO services from companies or freelancers that guarantee to rank 1st for any given keyword. Here’s Google’s take on guaranteed SEO:

If you are not experienced, you might be tempted to choose an SEO company that guarantees you’ll rank first for your main keywords over a company that doesn’t offer this guarantee. Makes sense, right? But it doesn’t.

The SEO companies that offer such guarantees are commonly formed by black hat SEOs that are not fully committed to making your website successful. They are just fine with taking your money for 3 or 6 months, and don’t care so much that eventually you’ll leave disappointed. That’s because at least 1000 of potential new clients search in Google each month for “Guaranteed SEO”. They can easily find another naive person to sell them guaranteed SEO services and replace your contract.

Be very picky and skeptical when choosing an SEO firm. If you don’t know where to start, Moz has a list of recommended SEO companies.

2. Buying Social Media Followers

The number of followers you have on social media is simply pointless. What matters is the engagement and how many real users see your posts. It’s not like in your childhood when it mattered if you or your brother had a bigger portion of goodies. Many fall into the trap of believing that the more followers their business has, the more trusted and reputable it will be.

You should never buy social media followers. Neither on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or whatever social media platform you choose to use for your sites. Bought “followers” are fake and besides being a waste of money, you can also end up having your account suspended.

3. Not Measuring The Success And ROI For Your Marketing Campaigns

All businesses and industries are different and therefore what works great for some, might not work as good for others. For example, social media can be a golden nugget for sites in the entertainment or technology industry, but for a business that sells forklifts will not be as important. Just because a channel works great for most sites doesn’t mean that you should block your resources on something that’s not suitable for your type of business.

To succeed with online marketing, you have to analyze and measure the success of all your campaigns and then focus most of your attention on the channels that give the best return of investment. Use an analytics tool like Kissmetrics to see where your site traffic is coming from and check how the visitors are funneling through your website.

It’s critical to measure how well your marketing campaigns are performing and know what you should prioritize for the future. If social media doesn’t work well for your site, you can focus more on creating quality content, or maybe launch a better advertisement campaign.

The most common mistake marketers tend to do is not to measure their campaigns and sources of conversions on a regular basis. It’s not enough to check what works best for your site once and then take decisions upon what you’ve discovered on that analysis. Each week, marketers should check what worked best and how the conversions are going for each channel. Marketers can do all of this within Kissmetrics.

4. Content Marketing Done Wrong

The interest for content marketing has grown to unexpected levels in the last years. It’s estimated that the whole industry is worth roughly $190 billion and it will grow to $300 billion by 2019.

Content marketing is about creating content in the form of videos, articles, infographics, images, slideshows, etc. With the industry growing so quickly, the competition is also becoming stronger and stronger. Quality is the differentiator between a good and a bad content marketing campaign.

The main reasons why most of your content marketing campaigns fail is because:

• You don’t write about topics that people are really interested in. Sure, it’s your blog and you can write about whatever you want, but if you are aiming to get more visitors, you have to research your topics. With the help of BuzzSumo, bloggers can find what content from other sites is performing great on social media. It’s a simply way to finding what works best for your competitors and what gets the most shares. The tool gives you access to an endless resource of topic ideas.

  
  It’s also a good idea to check what key phrases people use to do searches in Google. For that, Google’s keyword tool can be very handy.

• You don’t promote the content campaigns you have created. It’s not enough to write an article, video or build a great infographic and then move on. Just because you’ve clicked the “publish” button, it doesn’t mean that your job is over. Not even close. You can’t just create some content, and hope that it will go viral. Things don’t work that way. Chances are nobody will ever find your new piece of content, unless you try to promote it. Do outreach and try to promote the content through influencers.
• You content marketing campaign has no value. You see low-quality content marketing campaigns everywhere. If the content you’ve created doesn’t bring value to the reader, don’t bother publishing it. Instead of posting 10 useless articles or videos, try to make one that will stand out as the best in the niche.

  It’s the same with guest blogging. There’s no point to write for sites that have no authority and no one has heard about them. Don’t spend your time and budget to write for several low-quality sites, but instead aim to be a contributor on the big sites in your industry.

5. Not taking backlinks seriously

Backlinks are important not just for SEO, but they can also send relevant referring traffic, help you build partnerships, bring you customers, and measure the success of your online marketing campaigns. Sadly, many tend to ignore backlinks and rarely check the ones of their site.

If you are running a content marketing campaign or simply doing outreach to promote your website, besides checking analytics, it’s also important to check your site’s backlinks. That’s so you can know whenever a site links back to you and see how successful was your outreach campaign. If your content marketing campaigns are not generating quality links, you might have to reconsider your strategy.

Here are several reasons why everyone should pay more attention to backlinks:

• Backlinks are the main ranking factor for Google and Bing and they will continue to be for the coming years. A site that has good backlinks will rank higher for more related keywords and get more traffic from search engines.
• Bad backlinks acquired naturally or because someone has built them to your site can drag your site down in the SERPs. It’s important to know whenever your site gets new backlinks or otherwise all your SEO efforts will be pointless and you’ll end up wasting time and money.
• Backlinks can tell you when a blogger sends a link to your site. You can thank them for recommending your site, and perhaps build a partnership with them.
• Backlinks can show what websites are referring the most traffic to you, and you can try to get more of the same.
• If you are buying ads through banners, it’s important to know if the advertiser removes the backlink.

To be up to date with all your site’s backlinks, you can use the SEO Tool Monitor Backlinks, which sends you an email whenever your earn or lose links. Besides the email alerts, the tool shows more than 15 different metrics for each backlink, to help you easily see in a glance their SEO quality. Another useful feature is the warning sign that is showed for links that have questionable metrics.

To prevent organic traffic loss, it’s advisable to often check your site’s backlinks. SEO is one of the best online marketing channels that can generate traffic, even if you are in a boring niche. If you’ve hired someone to do SEO for you, you still have to check your site’s backlinks. Don’t sit back and think that everything will be alright. Your business responsibility is still in your hands and you are the only one that’s going to lose in case something goes wrong.

One of the worst mistakes people tend to do about backlinks is thinking that they need hundreds or thousands of links to rank high in Google. All that matters is QUALITY. The number of links you have is not important and you shouldn’t be obsessed about it. It’s best to have 10 quality links rather than 1000 backlinks from unknown sites.

6. Outsourcing To Bad Companies

As your online business starts to grow, you can start to consider outsourcing some of the tasks to a specialized company. You can outsource social media, content marketing, SEO, advertising management, etc. Whatever you outsource, don’t forget that you are still in charge and you can take over if the results are not the ones you expect.

There are numerous cases where companies are outsourcing services to a bad content marketing or SEO firm. However, they keep using their services. That’s because when outsourcing, companies tend to rely solely on the reporting provided by the outsourcing firm.

If your results are not close to your expectations, and you have a feeling that your money are being wasted, take action before it’s too late.

Conclusion

It’s hard to succeed with online marketing without measuring all your channels correctly. Set your KPIs and don’t be afraid to change or stop working on a channel that’s consuming too much financial and time resources.

Be very doubtful when choosing to work with an outsourcing company and continue to use your own tools to measure the success of their campaigns.

About the Author: Felix Tarcomnicu is an Internet marketer with a strong passion for SEO and social media. You can follow him on Google Plus or Twitter @FelixTarcomnicu for similar articles.

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Deal: Grab 84% off stock images from Depositphoto

Everyone wants to capture that one perfect image for their site. Art direction does more than layout, or even content, to set the tone of your site. But unfortunately custom photography is budget-sapping, and deadline-wrecking. The good news is, that perfect shot probably already exists…

To help you find it, our sister-site MightyDeals.com, has managed to bring back one of its most popular deals ever: an incredible 84% off Depositphotos library of stock images.

Depositphotos has over 50,000,000 images to choose from, including hi-res shots and vector images. Split into popular categories like Business, Computers, Holidays, People, Shopping, and tons more; you’re sure to find the perfect image for your project.

For just $99 you can download 100 images of your choice, that’s an incredible saving of $537! And if you like that, you’ll love the fact that you can save even more by choosing the 200 photos option, just $0.80 per image!

You can download any size you choose, which makes this the perfect option for responsive and retina design. There’s no daily limits, download as many as you like straight away—you’ve got a whole year to download them all. And all of the images are royalty free, so you don’t have to worry about checking the fine print. Quality stock images frequently cost 25 times more than this, so it really is an incredible opportunity to bolster your toolbox.

Head over to MightyDeals to take advantage of this awesome deal today!

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Google Chrome moves into TV with new cast option

If you’ve ever wanted to play digital media content right from your browser on your TV—without the need for an extra browser extension to make this happen, now’s the time to get excited. For the first time ever, people will be able to project their favorite TV shows and movies from the web directly to their TVs with the simple selection of the Cast option, found in Chrome 51’s new dropdown menu.

Chromecast is Google’s line of digital media players, think of them as mere dongles, that allow users to beam audio and video content from the web and their smartphones straight to their TVs. Cast-enabled monitors can also display the Wi-Fi-streamed content.

What makes this change significant is that Google manufactures both the software and hardware of this Cast technology: the browser and its content and the physical dongle that you plug into your TV or Cast-enabled monitor. However, people always had to rely on a browser extension to make this Google service work, which begged the question of why Google just didn’t do everything itself?

Now it is, thanks to the arrival of the Cast option within Chrome beta.

If you’re interested in exploring this new Chrome functionality, try to update your Chrome browser to version 51. Of course, that may be a problem for some users since Google is notorious for rolling out new features slowly, over time, so you may just have to wait until the update rolls around to you.

Google is also streamlining the delivery, which lets Chrome control the parameters on its own. Users benefit from this because they won’t be asked anymore whether they want to tweak the settings for various things like the resolution, quality of the cast, and bitrate. All that’s done automatically by Chrome.

That’s not all, though.

The company’s chat feature, Google Hangouts, will be able to receive casts, too. Appropriately named, Cast to Hangouts was actually first identified in May, but now it appears to be rolling out completely to a stable release.

Reports say that Cast to Hangouts comes with at least one noteworthy feature that’s unexpected, but also helpful. It actually scans your calendar to see if you already have any earlier scheduled Hangouts. Another interesting feature is the ability of users to share their tabs or desktops right to Hangouts. This ends up working as a sort of de facto screenshare, except there’s no audio that’s included. Users should take note that, to make this work, they’ll have to first have “cloud services” turned on.

When it comes to the availability of casting for Hangouts, it’s not much better than the gradual rollout of Chrome’s Cast option. Projections say that it’s going to be available for Chrome 52, but nothing is set in stone, one way or another.

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Face facts: You’re replaceable, and there’s only 2 things you can do about it

Let’s say that co-owners of a business who know nothing about creating a website (except that they need one) are in the market for a website.

They need a site that gives potential customers all the info they need about the boutique and includes an e-commerce section, too. And ideally, they’d like the project to be wrapped up sooner, rather than later, if you please.

These business owners are going to consider the offerings of the first four readers of this article.

You’re one of the four, of course…

You create websites. You have great experience and know you’ll be able to deliver exactly what the business owners need. You charge a fair price—one that adequately values your labor and experience—and always deliver an end product that’s up to spec.

The reader next to you produces a website that meets all of the owners’ requirements – but charges half your price. The next reader in line creates a website (that also meets basic requirements) at half your turnaround time. And the person who came before all three of you offers a faster turnaround and lower price on a website that—yep—still meets all of the owners’ requirements.

Whose work is better?

Let’s say that you have a strong hunch your competitors are cutting corners. You’re pretty sure at those prices and turnaround schedules, they’ve got to have subpar practices in place. They put in zero effort to optimize the site for search. They have no strategy to the sites they create. Or they just have (ugh) crappy, generic design.

You could try to secure the boutique owners’ business by pointing out all of the many, many ways your work is the best. You could stress your years of experience. You could tell your potential customers again and again that you create great websites. The best websites. Better than all the websites of all the other designers they’re considering, though, of course, you really have no surefire way of determining exactly who they’re considering or what your competitors’ final products are like.

Unfortunately, your competitors are probably doing the same thing.

And your potential customer doesn’t know who to believe. But whatever. They need this thing done. They choose the designer with price that is lowest and turnaround that’s fastest, since to them all competitors’ experience and final sites are on-par.

How are you supposed to make yourself stand out?!

If you can’t do it cheaper or faster and so. many. customers. don’t understand why your techniques or practices are better than other companies’, how the hell are you supposed to stand out in such a crowded field?

I see two big opportunities to set yourself apart:

Option 1: Find a niche and burrow deep. Like, really deep

This one’s all about zeroing in on your customer.

Maybe it’s crafting strategy and producing websites for food trucks serving woodfired pizza. Maybe it’s oral surgeons’ offices. Maybe it’s California boho-chic boutiques and fashion designers. General contractors. Elementary schools. Veterinarians.

Whatever it is, find your niche. Narrow it down. Then narrow it down some more. Learn all the ins and outs of maxillofacial surgery, or the precise message that boho-chic boutiques are trying to send. Orient your tone, sales pitch, and offerings to cater to that niche. Reach out to trade groups. Conferences. Professional networks.

Focusing in on a specific niche doesn’t mean that you’re closing yourself off to other customers. Instead, it’s a way to create a stronger connection with a specific subset of buyers. And that connection can raise you above your competitors in the eyes of your customer.

Option 2: Play to your differences, not just your strengths

This one’s about focusing in on you.

When you offer a final product, as we web designers do, you’re replaceable. People all around the globe can create websites. And an endless array of competitors can beat you in price, efficiency, or other commodified measures.

The one thing that your competitors can’t beat you in is being you. Only you are you.

I know that sounds pretty cheesy, but it’s true. There’s something that makes you you, and not someone else. There’s something that makes your team your team, and not any other team. There’s some quality that catches the attention of others and piques their interest—oh, that’s different.

Stand out. Engross them with your you. Find that unique point of difference, explore it, emphasize it, solidify it. When you zero in on what makes you different, not just what makes your skills strong, or your process solid, you stand out.

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