A quick Google for “web designers in Salisbury” will show that there are a huge amount of local web designers. We keep a regular check on this and often see new web designers appearing and disappearing, it seems to be a sporadic industry, but why?
Well first of all it would be worth noting that there are several successful web designers in Salisbury which can be either consultants or web design agencies. It is these web agencies that we could consider our real competitors, and many produce high quality websites. Just as we will be, they are likely to be around for some time to come.
Google maps shows a comprehensive list of web designers in Salisbury, and clicking on their place markers gives an address and photo of their offices. This makes it clear that vast majority of the local website designers are not larger agencies but, in fact work from home.
Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with working from home. We started out this way and did so for many years; there was no need for us at that stage to have an office. But what it does suggest is that, excluding a few consultants, a lot of Salisbury’s website designers are smaller one man bands.
Some of these are likely to have experience, but many appear overnight (which they can do as web designers do not need qualifications), and literally anyone with a computer and internet connection can become a web designer.
This hypothesis is backed up in the various networking events that I attend where many (not all) of the other web designers do not seem to have the experience or expertise that I would consider mandatory.
This in itself is not an issue, this is the same for many industries, and it’s likely that these web designers will be able to produce simple websites at a far lower cost than a larger web agency.
We found that the struggle at this end of the market is that, as anyone can become a web designer, the lower end of the market is exhausted. There are simply too many website designers competing for the low quality and low budget websites, so it makes sense that not all will survive.
From our observations, the ones that seem to last usually have more industry experience, and as such produce higher quality websites, and therefore increase their prices moving away from the low budget projects.
It is easy to become a web designer, and easy to set up your own agency. What is more difficult is to set up a successful web design agency in Salisbury (and I’m sure this is mirrored in other locations). It’s easy for a web designer to pop up, and even easier from them to disappear.
Unfortunately this affects clients and we quite often pick up projects from smaller web agencies that do not have the resources to respond to enquiries or the expertise to resolve problems, or even worse ones who have disappeared.
Our advice to anyone looking at choosing a web designer in Salisbury, is to pick a web agency who have been established for at least a few years, and one who answers the phone if you call them. Obviously we would always recommend ourselves, but there are several other decent local web agencies to choose from.