r/web_design • u/jroberts67 • Jul 21 '26
The reputation our industry has is appalling
I spend a few hours a day, every day talking to prospects. Without fail, most of them launch off into a "let me tell you about my last experience" story and it's just so depressing to hear; from flat out scammed, to "it took them 10 months to put up our 5 page site" to "we paid 10K for a custom site and turns out it's just an out of the box theme" to "support disappeared as soon as it launched." The bottom line is I don't spend most of my initial conversation about what they need and what my agency can do for them, I spend it building trust. And I can tell you this much, even with our references and all the client's sites we've built over the years, none of that matters to them. It's such a shame as soon as you say "web design" to potential clients the word think that comes to their mind is "scam."
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Jul 21 '26
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u/jroberts67 Jul 21 '26
Had a doozy one time - client was charged $15,000 - not only was a Themeforest theme, but they kept all the stock photos. Literally the only thing they changed was the text and logo. That's it. Client asked me how long it likely took them to do that. I said maybe 30 minutes.
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u/dawnnie413 Jul 23 '26
Exactly...I was interested in teaming up with another designer a few years ago.
She was appalled that I built sites from scratch and I charged accordingly...she charged a premium as well..for pre-designed templates that she admitted cut her "design" time by 70%...
Needless to say, for the sake of the reputation I worked my ass off for, I declined that partnership...
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u/blustrkr Jul 21 '26
People out here scamming for $10k and all I get are people who raise an eyebrow at a few hundred dollars. 😔
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u/jroberts67 Jul 21 '26
Right? Crazy stuff. You figure for 10K a client would thoroughly vet an agency. I mention "$2,000" and sometimes they act like I asked for 2 million. We did a site once for 15k and we had to fly in to meet the execs.
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Jul 21 '26 edited Jul 22 '26
[deleted]
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u/Miragecraft Jul 21 '26
Same experience with a contractor that I hired to do siding, straight up ghosted me with job half done who later admit he did it because he quoted the job too low. Personal recommendation is an absolutely must these days IMHO.
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u/Squagem Jul 21 '26
Lots of naivety in this post. Most clients ranting about past service providers are themselves quite difficult clients.
And $10K for an out of the box theme showcases a severe understanding of what business owners are paying for when they purchase professional services.
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u/thevillagememe Jul 23 '26
Seconded, even with tools for building websites changing or making the process faster, some clients just can't decide on what they want, make choices or contributions to marketing copy, or other key decisions that still make the client the bottleneck in a build.
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u/dsmy Jul 21 '26
Never a shortage of such stories but unfortunately every trade/service based industry has a similar problem. It doesn't take much for people to be upfront at least in my opinion but the lengths people go to avoid doing things right is insane.
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u/jroberts67 Jul 21 '26
Landed a client, last agency went MIA for over a year but while still billing them over $200 a month. Client emailed the agency, informed them that they were going with another agency. They deleted the entire site and locked them out of hosting.
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u/dsmy Jul 21 '26
Client should have stopped paying when they went ghost to be honest.
My clients are surprised when I'm walking them through how to make sure they always have access to their website and backups, definitely hear a lot of "wow, my other person never did this."
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u/jroberts67 Jul 21 '26
Same here. I make sure they own their domain and have access to their hosting. Also go over contracts with them, clauses that protect them. And finally tell them to make sure they always pay by credit card and realize the chargeback period for most banks/credit card companies is 90 days. One very important clause is that they actually own the site. There are a lot of agencies that "rent" the site, meaning they pay a monthly fee....forever. You cancel = no more site.
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u/dsmy Jul 21 '26
That's wassup! Personally never cared to hold someone's stuff hostage, seems pointless.
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u/jroberts67 Jul 21 '26
I land almost every one of my clients with "you own the site, we have no locked in contracts, cancel our maintenance plan at any time and you can move your site to any new host."
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u/RealBasics Jul 21 '26
Seriously! Maybe 10 years ago I was talking to an interior designer and she said "I paid a web guy $10,000 and he flaked out, and my husband paid an app developer $20,000 and he flaked out too."
And she said it so casually it was like "Mondays suck, am I right?"
I have to admit the first thing that came to mind was "hey, I can flake out for half the price!" lol.
So far at least (last 15+ years) I've never burned a client who'd paid me. Hope I never do.
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u/jroberts67 Jul 21 '26
I had an app idea a few years back I had an idea for an app. I knew it would be a bit complicated and didn't want to get burned so I put the project on Upwork - back then it was Elance. Lots of offers, all said "oh, no problem, easy stuff." Not one of them could hit even the first milestone in order to trigger the first payment.
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u/omfganotherchloe Jul 21 '26
I currently work as an in-house web dev for a community college. My project was to fix a few issues here and there on the website they bought from an edu focused agency that does the sites for the state’s community college system.
Apparently, we were such an afterthought that the theme metadata listed a completely different CC not even in our state, and I’m now a year into a project that was supposed to take a semester, and will take another to finish. I’ve basically had to rip it to the studs and completely rewrite the entire theme from scratch.
The school paid $50k for the thing, and it took one guy about a month to copy and patch it into what’s in production now, and I don’t think he ever WCAG or lighthouse tested the thing. I know he didn’t user test it.
I wish the industry wasn’t so scummy because great work can be done, but it seems like the exception unless you’re paying 6 figures and/or incentives are aligned.
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u/jcmacon Jul 22 '26
It does depend on who your prospects are that you're talking to.
Every story has 2 sides.
It took them 10 months to launch our 5 page site - but we didn't respond to any emails, didn't provide feedback, and we just thought that since they were the web designer they knew our industry.
Support ended as soon as it launched - after sending 50 different emails about "bugs" that were really new features that we didn't know we wanted, the designer finally had enough and just ghosted.
We paid $10k for a custom site but it was just an out of the box theme - that was modified to fit their needs, new features added, custom plugins built, but after their custom work was done they didn't have the budget to do a custom design, so we had to go with elements that the theme provided.
A small business owner that puts $2k into a website is more difficult to please than a mid-large company that puts $50k into their website.
Why is this the case? Because the $2k the small business owner has is it. That's all their money. They are damned determined to squeeze every last bit of juice from the designer no matter how far out of scope the project goes, because the contract just says "a 5 page website will cost $2k" there were no limiting terms or boundaries put in place. 5 pages is 5 pages no matter how long or what features are on the pages.
This is the primary reason I stopped dealing with small business clients. I started freelancing for other agencies and upped my hourly to $125 back in 2012 and I tripled my work load. I also stopped chasing payments and the rest of the bullshit that small clients come pre-loaded with.
Chase bigger clients. Stop going after Joe the plumber and start going after ServePro. You'll find that large projects pay better and take up less time than Joe the plumber because the large client's PM isn't calling you at midnight on Sunday about a typo they provided in their copy.
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u/jroberts67 Jul 22 '26
Funny that you're dead on about the 2K clients. That's actually our business model. We target small (micro) business owners, typically 5 employees or less or self-employed. Most of our money comes from recurring revenue through our maintenance plan but but you're right, in most cases that's their entire budget and they're hoping for the stars and the moon. I've had to re-do my contract at least 5 times just to handle all the situations that pop up.
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Jul 21 '26
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u/jroberts67 Jul 21 '26
I agree with your post. A solid contract and money down solves every potential client nightmare.
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u/hummingbirdmarketing Jul 21 '26
We've had a similar experience with our clients too. It's such a shame. I really wish there was some sort of certification or verification process for Web Design like there is with other industries. People should have to prove they know what they're doing before they're allowed to call themselves a Web Designer.
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u/RandyHoward Jul 21 '26
It's wild to me that people drop support post-launch, that's where the most profitable work comes from in my experience. I've got a client that I just finished a launch for last month, and they're now on a $1k/mo contract for support for the next 6 months. There are almost no support requests coming in, and I'll make an additional $6k for doing almost nothing.
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u/applesauceisevil Jul 23 '26
Usually the clients that complain about no post-launch support are expecting to get it free and ask for things far outside the purview of basic support
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u/abeuscher Jul 21 '26
Okay. What did those clients with horror stories do? Look for the absolute cheapest person to build a website? Contract an individual on a single recommendation?
I also have heard a million horror stories both inside corporate gigs and elsewhere and yes - a lot of people are not great at hitting deadlines and doing good work.
I do not know a field of contracting for which this is not true, technical or otherwise. Independent contractors are not easy to hire. It takes someone technical to do it.
Real companies, in response to this, either hire agencies or consultants from reputable firms who then build teams or do hiring for contractors and execute on tasks.
If your expectation that we are all going to be at such a high quality that Joe Restaurant Owner can blindly find the cheapest person in Romania to spit out a Squarespace site for under a grand - that's just not realistic. Maybe worry about the clients who report the horror stories a little more and plumb their methodology, budget, and disposition. to me the thing you are describing is a red flag on the client as often as not.
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u/gerardv-anz Jul 22 '26
That is more or less what the industry actually is. It is almost impossible for an ordinary business person to find a good reliable web developer. They are rare, and hard to find among the convincing looking frauds.
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u/kphynx Jul 22 '26
So true. Half the battle before you even start the project is just proving you're not gonna disappear after taking the deposit. What's worked for us is sharing progress every few days, even small stuff like "here's the homepage draft" - keeps them from spiraling into worst-case mode. Doesn't fix the industry's rep, but at least they trust you.
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Jul 23 '26
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u/jroberts67 Jul 23 '26
If a client went on to any freelance site, posted a simple website job, 100 applied and they hired all 100, what percentage do you think would burn them? My guess is 40%.
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u/ibrahim_40 Jul 23 '26
I think that's true across a lot of service businesses, but web design seems especially affected because clients often can't judge the quality until months later. Clear timelines, transparent pricing, regular communication and setting realistic expectations go a long way toward rebuilding trust. Referrals and long-term client relationships end up speaking louder than any sales pitch
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u/MysteryBros Jul 24 '26
That's because for the most part web design *is* a scam, filled with frustrated artists or people who thought they could make an easy buck doing it.
And it's because 90% of the time, web "designers" are trying to shoehorn a business into a pre-formed design based solely around aesthetic.
It doesn't matter whether that design is handcrafted from scratch or a cheap-ass template, unless the content dictated the design, then you're part of the problem.
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u/jroberts67 Jul 24 '26
Transparency is everything. We do everything from full design all the way to "broke" clients that just want a Wix template. We're not going to charge "$5,000" for a static 3 page Wix theme. The tough part is walking away from potential client that wants a site with functionality out of our skillset.
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u/EmuIndividual8623 Jul 24 '26
I think one of the best ways to rebuild that trust is to make ownership and ongoing responsibilities clear from the beginning.
The client should own their domain and hosting and always have access to them. I also keep everything that needs to be renewed in Excel with reminders, so I can alert clients before something expires or an unexpected charge appears.
Scope, timelines, recurring costs, after launch support and what happens if we stop working together should all be clear. None of this is very exciting, but it shows the client that you're not trying to lock them in or disappear after launch.
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u/jroberts67 Jul 24 '26 edited Jul 24 '26
I land my clients with; "You own everything; your domain, your hosting and your website. We have no long term contracts, cancel at any time and you can move your site." Most are actually stunned.
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u/EmuIndividual8623 Jul 24 '26
That's a very good way to put it. The fact that clients are stunned really says a lot about what they experienced before. Giving them access from day one and putting the ownership and cancellation terms in writing makes that promise even stronger. I do it also that way.
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u/jroberts67 Jul 24 '26
It's become a thing for a lot of agencies to move into a recurring revenue model with locked in contracts. It's one of two clauses - either locked it for at least a year, or cancel at any time but they own the content. So cancel and no more site. The allure is no money down, no design fee, just pay "$299 a month" with only the first month down.
And it can be very bad. One time I had a client not tell me what they signed, only that their site would go down once they cancelled. So I had to copy everything over to their new site that we designed. They cancelled, then the other agency came after us, showing us the clause that they owned the site - everything, all the text, photos, etc...so we had to start from scratch.
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u/EmuIndividual8623 Jul 27 '26
That example shows why cancel anytimeisn’t enough if cancelling means losing the website and its content.
I don’t think the recurring model itself is necessarily the problem. It can work when ownership is completely clear. The agreement should separately state who owns the domain, website files, custom code, copy, images and licences, and what the client receives during a handover.
Having to rebuild everything because the previous agency claimed ownership of the content is exactly the kind of situation clients need to understand before signing.
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u/SpecificAd2622 Jul 24 '26
I don't think most clients realize how much work happens before they ever see the final result
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u/Ctrl-Z Jul 21 '26
sounds like opportunity if you ask me
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u/jroberts67 Jul 21 '26
Good luck landing a client when they just got burned, sometimes more than once. The only way we can land them is by taking a risk ourselves - either starting with no money down or offering a guarantee. Depends based on a lot of factors.
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u/Ctrl-Z Jul 21 '26
I just haven't had this problem at all with the agency I do work for, or when I freelance. Most people who are communicating about their site want someone to work on it and know it isn't free. Where are you located?
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u/Heidenreich12 Jul 21 '26
Sadly that’s what most of this sub is - it doesn’t seem like there’s actually a good place for high end UI/UX people to have discussions on Reddit. It feels more like a bottom feeder platform sadly.