If you offer web design services to clients, regardless of whether you’re a freelancer or running an agency, there are plenty of other related services you could offer.
By offering additional services, you’ll be able to increase the revenue you earn from the average client, meaning that you can make more money with fewer clients. Your clients can also benefit from having one provider for multiple services, rather than needing to find and hire several different professionals.
Of course, branching out and offering more services does come with some drawbacks as well. You probably won’t want to offer every additional service possible, because it’s usually a good idea to narrow in and focus on a few things.
However, even if web design is your primary focus, offering a few of these additional services can go a long way towards increasing the profitability of your business without spreading yourself too thin.
Web Design Services List (and Related Services)
Let’s look at some of the specific services you could offer in this web design services list. Your own personal experience and expertise will play a role in the services you choose to offer, but later in the article, we’ll look at a few different options you could consider if you don’t have existing expertise in these areas.
If you’re trying to answer the question “What services do web designers offer?”, here are some potential answers.
1. Ongoing Website Maintenance
Clients that hire you to design a website are extremely likely to need additional service at some point. Even if the website is built with a content management system (like WordPress) that allows the client to easily add and manage the content on their own, there will still be some maintenance needed at some point.
This maintenance could involve minor design or layout changes, new sections of the website, or other details that the client is not able to handle on their own through a CMS.
When it comes to ongoing maintenance, there are a few different ways you can offer this service. You could charge an hourly rate and bill clients for whatever worth they need, or you could create a package and charge a monthly retainer. For example, the package would have a flat monthly fee and would entitle the client to specific things like priority support and a specific number of hours of work each month.
Offering maintenance as a package can be a great choice because it helps you to ensure some ongoing revenue, adding some predictability to an otherwise unpredictable income.
Maintenance packages can also be great for clients because it allows the client to know how much they should budget for ongoing expenses related to their website, and they know that you’ll be easy to reach whenever they need support.
2. WordPress Support
WordPress is such an incredibly popular content management system that a large percentage of new websites are being built on the platform. According to statistics, WordPress powers 34% of the internet, and that number is rising.
WordPress is an ideal CMS for many small and medium-sized businesses, and everyone loves the fact that it’s free. But WordPress users are bound to run into some issues that require a little bit of help.
The downside of a free CMS is that getting help and support can be a challenge. There’s a free support forum, but getting answers to your questions there can be hit or miss. Many clients want someone to do the work for them, rather than spending hours reading through forums trying to find solutions.
Offering WordPress support could be a lot like offering ongoing website maintenance, except for the fact that you’re specifically focusing on WordPress (and as a result, you’re branding yourself as a WordPress expert). This WordPress support could be billed hourly, or you could offer maintenance packages with a flat monthly fee, like we discussed in the previous point.
3. Hosting
Your web design clients will need hosting, and this is another service you can offer. Best of all, hosting produces ongoing monthly revenue, and as you add more clients, that hosting revenue will increase.
To offer web hosting to your clients, you don’t need to have and manage your own servers. You can easily get a reseller hosting account that will allow you to offer to host your clients without the need to manage the details yourself.
Before offering hosting for your clients, you’ll want to consider the time that will be required for providing support. Look at the details of the reseller hosting packages that you are considering and see if you would be responsible for providing all customer service to your clients. If it’s not worth your time, you might want to move on and skip this service. Part of this will depend on what you are able to charge for the hosting service.
4. Logo Design
Every business needs a logo, and many of your web design clients will be looking for a logo designer as well. If you’re creating a new site for a startup, they’ll probably need a logo. If you’re doing a website redesign for a client with an existing business, this may be a good time for that client to consider updating their brand image with a new logo.
Logo design can work hand-in-hand with web design, so you can package the two services together, or you can offer each service separately.
Another reason to consider offering logo design as a service is that it can be very lucrative.
5. Graphic Design
While logo design is one aspect of graphic design, there are plenty of other things you could design for your clients, like business cards, brochures and marketing materials, labels, and more.
Clients who hire you to design a website may benefit from some of these other services, and you could even create packages that include things like a website, logo, brochures, etc.
6. Ad Design
Most of your web design clients will do advertising of some kind, and they may not have the capability to design those ads in-house. It could be banner ads that are used online, magazine ads, billboards, or any other type of advertising.
7. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO is a natural fit because if you’re designing a website for a client, that client can get more value from their website if it’s effective at driving traffic from search engines.
Of course, there’s some overlap between the two services. As a web designer, you should be creating the website to be search engine friendly, but full-fledged SEO services can go much deeper. This may involve on-page SEO and creating pages or content that are optimized to rank for specific keywords, or it could involve off-page SEO and link building.
8. Social Media Management
Most businesses use social media in some capacity, but very few are maximizing the potential of social media. Entrepreneurs and small businesses often don’t have the time or manpower to effectively manage their social media profiles on their own, and that’s where you come in.
You could offer to help clients by managing their social profiles, which will free up their time for other things that are more important to their business. Many social media managers or virtual assistants will offer packages that include a specific number of posts to different social networks. For example, the client may pay you a monthly fee to manage their Facebook page and schedule two new posts per day.
Your design skills can also come in handy here. You can create images and graphics for use with your clients’ social profiles, and you can also design branded profile images that will help to make their profiles stand out.
9. Ad Management
Many businesses need help with setting up and managing online advertisements. There is a huge demand for freelancers and agencies that have expertise with Facebook ads and Google AdWords.
As an ad manager, you could create ads for your clients, set up the campaigns, continually test and manage the campaigns, and provide reports that show the results to your clients.
10. Copywriting
If you have some writing skills, you could offer copywriting services to your clients. In many cases, this would involve writing the copy or text for a landing page or sales page. This can be a very lucrative service because effective copywriting can have dramatic results in terms of the sales that it generates.
Since you will be working on the client’s website anyway, offering a service related to writing the text for these pages would be a natural fit.
11. Keyword Research
Earlier, I mentioned the possibility of offering SEO services. Keyword research is one important aspect of SEO that you could zero in on. Additionally, it’s easier to learn than some of the other skills covered in this article.
Keyword research is a critical aspect of SEO, but many of your clients will have no idea how to do it, or they won’t have the time to do their own keyword research.
Your keyword research services could involve identifying and suggesting the best keywords for your clients to target with their website and the content that they publish. For most of your clients, you may want to focus on low-competition keywords that give smaller sites a realistic chance to rank on the first page of Google.
12. Email Marketing
Email marketing typically produces a very strong ROI, so this may be an area where your clients are willing and able to spend some money for a professional like yourself.
Your services could include designing HTML emails (or HTML email templates for your clients to use), as well as writing the text, designing images to be used in the emails, and even setting up and managing the campaigns.
13. Analytics
Almost all of your web design clients will want access to some data and analytics to provide insight into the effectiveness of their site. Of course, Google Analytics is a powerful free program that your clients can use, but GA can be a bit overwhelming and confusing. Some of your clients may be looking for a professional to help with interpreting the reports from Google Analytics and to implement any changes that are needed to improve the results.
Chances are, you already include Google Analytics code for client websites that you set up. Why not go a step further and offer a service to help with Analytics?
It could be as simple as a consultation where you walk the client through the Google Analytics dashboard and explain things to them so they can pay attention to it going forward. Or, you could provide weeky or monthly reports with any relevant recommendations based on the data in those reports.
Ways to Offer These Services
Ok, so now that we’ve looked at many different services that you could offer to your web design clients, let’s talk about the logistics of actually offering these services. Here are your basic options:
Do the Work Yourself
Of course, the first option is to provide the service yourself. You’ll need to have experience and expertise with any service that you’re performing on your own. Some services will require you to have a great deal of experience in order to do an effective job for your clients, while other services use skills that you could improve and develop pretty quickly.
Part of the challenge here is simply time management. If you have a lot of available time and not many clients at this point, time may not be a big challenge. But if you’re already busy with web design work, you may find it to be challenging to offer additional services.
Hire Others to Do the Work
Maybe you want to offer services that do not fit well with your existing strengths, and in that case, it might be better to hire someone else or outsource the work as opposed to trying to develop those new skills for yourself.
The point of offering additional services is to increase revenue, and that added revenue may allow you to have enough income to hire someone to do the work.
You could hire freelancers as needed, or bring on a full-time employee. Regardless of which path you chose, you won’t need to do all of the work yourself.
Partner with Other Freelancers or Brands
The last option that we’ll look at is to partner with another service provider. Instead of hiring someone else to do the work, you could find a freelancer or an agency that offers services complementary to yours, and come up with some sort of partnership agreement that is mutually beneficial.
Final Thoughts on Website Services
As you can see, there are many different things that could be offered aside from just web design services and web development services. These other website services can allow you to have more to offer to clients (and to make more money from each client), and also allow you to reach more clients. As you build up your client base and continue to add new services, your profit potential will continue to increase as well.
