Our recent webinar with award-winning web designer Alex Alexakis explored how he used Duda to build websites at the speed and scale needed to catapult profit at his agency. This article presents some key insights that Alex shared to help boost your agency’s web design operations using Duda’s speed and scalability.
Why Build Websites Quickly?
The average website budget for small businesses ranges from $1000 - $2500. These companies really need to get established with a web presence, but funding is obviously limited. When contacting web design agencies, small businesses often get quoted unfeasible prices for custom-built websites of $5000 or even $10000.
From an agency or web designer’s perspective, building websites fast ensures you can take on these small business clients while remaining profitable. But fast website building doesn’t have to mean low quality. In fact, many small local businesses fail because their sites don’t give out the right signals and relevance for what they do.
You don’t need to go as comprehensive with the site features and design as for larger clients, but you do need to get a high-quality design within the constraints of time. There is even the option to upsell additional services to these smaller clients who are very likely to need SEO, eCommerce, or perhaps a design refresh in the future as they start to grow their own businesses.
3 Steps to Building Fast and Being Profitable
There are three key steps to building websites fast and being profitable:
Sell for low upfront costs in the knowledge that doing a good job for small businesses carries a high probability of future recurring revenue streams via upselling.- Plan properly and gather all relevant information about how the site should look and function, otherwise, you’ll end up wasting time on each project.
- Build the site using Duda and leverage features such as prebuild sections and templates to design professional websites at speed.
When figuring out the total upfront cost to charge clients, a useful general formula is:
Time + Expenses + 40% Profit Margin = Upfront selling price for website
Time includes all the time taken on various tasks in the project, including client communication, pre-planning and sketching, choosing stock photos, and then building the site. Expenses include content and buying stock photos. Using a standard hourly rate of $75 for US web designers, a typical 15-hour project for a small business with an additional $300 worth of expenses works out as a price of $1,925, which should fall within budget for most small clients.
Recurring Revenue Sources
While there is obviously a profit margin built into the price, recurring revenue sources can really power profitability when taking on small clients. You can package various services into different bundles and sell them on a monthly basis. Some ideas include:
Hosting + SSL certificate management- Hosting + SSL + page updates
- Local SEO + Google My Business management
- Hosting + SSL + Personalization
The personalization features already exist within Duda so there is not much extra work from web designers in providing those services. The goal here is to do a stellar job with your initial design and offer desired extra services that meet specific client pain points. You want to improve the chances of these clients becoming customers for life.
Properly Planning Site Design
After selling a website and getting a written contract outlining the scope of services provided, the next step is to plan the website. This step is crucial in being able to build at a level of speed that ensures profitability because you’re charging a lower price. The four steps of planning are:
- Architecture-
opting for a flat architecture makes the most sense for what usually start out as simple 5-page websites
- Keyword research-
use your favorite SEO tool to find relevant keywords for the client’s different pages (homepage, FAQ, service costs, service type, etc)
- Wireframes/sketches-
use wireframes to represent the skeletal framework of the website and briefly sketch out the design by mapping Duda’s features to the wireframe. Instead of a wireframe, you could even write out the skeletal site framework on a piece of paper.
- Order content & gather images-
order some content for the site online (or write it yourself) and purchase some stock images.
Having this plan in place brings the dual benefit of saving time in the design process while also enhancing the client’s impression of your professionalism. Furthermore, the way the site is planned out minimizes time spent waiting around for the client to provide documentation or images, or copy.
One potential stumbling block is that when choosing stock photos, you might get some pushback from the client because the images don’t seem quite right for the website. One way to minimize the chances of this happening is to ask some colleagues to take a look and see if they can guess what type of business it is and what the site is about based on the photos.
Build the Website with Duda
When the time comes to actually build the website, Duda’s drag and drop editor is intuitive to use and facilitates swift page designs. A slew of excellent templates for different kinds of site pages (eg services) make the process even faster. It’s very easy to delete, add, and modify different elements on templates so that you can give websites that “custom feel” that clients are looking for.
The typical time taken to build websites for small business clients using Duda is 12-15 hours. You can achieve similar site designs with WordPress, but it’s likely to take much longer due to the significant development time needed to tweak the design versus the drag and drop functionality and easy editing within Duda.
When building a site from the ground up in WordPress (due to wanting to optimize for specific features, SEO, and Core Web vitals) the extra development time can stretch these projects out to 2-3 months. With Duda, you can usually go from the initial communication to providing the client with their website within 2 weeks. Duda’s out-of-the-box optimizations for Core Web Vitals ensure high-performing websites as soon as they go live without any work from the designer’s perspective.
Closing Thoughts
In summary, web designers shouldn’t automatically assume that smaller clients are not worth taking on or can’t be profitable. With some smart processes in place and by unlocking the features of Duda, you can design professional custom websites for small businesses rapidly and then upsell other services to make recurring revenue streams.
