

Ask HN: What are web design/development companies doing wrong? - billpatrianakos

I'm in the web design/development business and I'm almost embarrassed to admit that. Why? Well it seems that nowadays everyone and their pet had a "web design firm". There are all these idiots running around calling themselves web designers/developers after reading the first few chapters of "Build a website for Dummies". They're all out there flooding the market with ridiculously low prices and low quality work. This in and of itself isn't as big a problem. The really big problem is that they end up pissing off their clients and those of us who are competent get a bad name as we are all lumped in together.<p>I'm not claiming to be great. I'm okay. Decent enough to charge what I do and nothing more (for now). But here's my big problem - I've been researching and brainstorming for months and months on how to differentiate myself from the competition and I cannot figure it out.<p>It seems everyone is operating in very much the same way. So I research the common the problems with these companies and there's a lot of talk about processes and problems with the tools we use but nothing really speaks to what problems our clients have that we are either not solving or could do a much better job of solving. The closest thing I've come up with as a differentiator is business strategy help for clients. Being in this business puts you in a unique position to spot flaws with the client's business strategy as we need to know their customer and their business, etc.<p>So after months of racking my brain I'm coming here to ask all you people I respect, what are web design companies doing wrong? What problems are we not solving and how can we solve current problems better?
======
billpatrianakos
Damn. No one cares enough to even downvote this. I sure feel retarded for
asking now.

