Ready to vent with me? I’m Holly Christie, website designer, mentor, and straight-talking website design advocate. This week I’m torch-lighting the five shady moves that keep giving our craft a black eye. In 20 punch-packed minutes you’ll hear me:

• Call out those 'custom' builds that are nothing more than slapped-on Elementor templates
• Drag the timeline-promise-breakers who ghost after pocketing the deposit
• Expose the radio-silence communicators and teach you how to lock them down with a rock-solid client contract
• Rant about the 'pretty-over-perform' crowd who ignore tech, security, and UX fundamentals
• Swat the copy-paste lurkers hijacking your LinkedIn posts for clout.
• Plus one bonus AI-built-site myth-buster you can’t miss

By the end, you’ll have a clearer playbook for protecting your reputation and your clients’ results. No sleaze required. Grab your earbuds, hit play, then snag my Website Designer Contract Pack to keep every project (and payment) on track.

Mentioned in this episode:

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From web designers ghosting clients to

marketing pre built websites as custom built

to really understanding the tech behind a website build.

This week I am talking all about the industry

practices that people hate. And when I say people,

I'm talking about web designers.

Hi, I'm Holly Christie. I'm from Website Made Simple. I am

a website designer. I am also a mentor to you lovely website

designers designers and I am here to make sure you get to have

a career that you absolutely love without being

driven into the ground by it. So,

ready to get started?

I asked on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago what web

designers hated about our industry.

Whilst the post itself got something like 130 comments,

a lot of them were very similar and I grouped

them into what will become this episode and one other episode

and thought that we could talk them through together. Let's get

started. The very first one that people said were pre

built websites being marketed as custom websites.

And I have to say I absolutely agree with this.

And if you've been following this podcast for a while, you will

know I am not a fan of Elementor.

Every single thing that we ever needed to do on this

website, we had to find a workaround for it because Elementor just didn't like the

theme. The theme didn't like it. And I think some of

my early experience of Elementor coming to the market because I'd been

a web designer way before Elementor was a thing, is

that people use these Elementor templates and they

market it as a custom built website and it

is not. And I worked with a really lovely client who she came

to me, she said she'd spent £5,000 on a

website where the developer had

just dropped the content into an Elementor pre built template.

And she came to me and said that she was really

feeling that she wasn't getting a return on the investment. And when we looked into

it, there wasn't any SEO structure on the website, there wasn't really

any personality on the website. And there was a lot that we ended up

pulling around and doing differently. And it

kind of brings us into the second point, which is,

it kind of brings us into the second point which is

over promising and under delivering. And someone

said, especially on timelines as well, that

often a web designer or developer will say, oh, we can get this done

in three weeks and it can be months and months later

and the client still doesn't have anything that they can show

for their investment. And this does happen on both sides. You know, we do,

as web developers, we do get clients ghost us and not give us the content.

And I usually find that people get very, very stuck around

the copywriting stages of their kind of content

creation there as well. But the developers who kind

of take the money and they disappear off with the design and they don't have

a solid process in place, they're the ones who are really giving the industry

a bad name. Now, if you're thinking, oh God, I don't mean

this to feel like me, but it does feel like me. I just get a

bit overwhelmed and I'm not very good at allocating my time to it. I am

here to help you with that. I have my website designers contract

pack which you can get from the website.

Websitesmadesimple.co.uk init has every

type of contract you can ever possibly need for running a website design process,

but it has, most importantly the one that you are going to give your

clients. It has the timelines in there with a breakdown of what

will happen week by week. And it's really good for

helping keep you on task with your builds. And pretty soon you'll

get into a routine with this as well and then you will wonder how you

lived without it, because trust me, this is is a piece of gold and you

can get it from websitesmadesimple.co.uk.

the other part of that was the lack of transparency and

communication. That also is covered in the website

designer's contract pack because it says when the client will be hearing

from them and you're contracted to do that. But people also said

about this over promising and under delivering that

sometimes web designers will say anything

to try and make the sale and they say, yeah, yeah, I can do this

and I can do that. And when it actually comes down to it, they

can't and they do a really poor job of it. What

they need to do at that point is look at upskilling. They maybe need to

look at collaborating with someone, maybe have someone finish off

the design or I offer website designers mentoring

so that we can work through the design together so that we can get that

user journey right in give something client's going to be really happy with.

It also means that they're going to be upskilled as well. So it's a good

investment to make there as well.

The next point from web designers were not understanding the

tech, the security and what goes into a good

website. Totally agree with that one. And

people can find that they offer a certain tech stack because they know

it rather than it being the absolute right best way to one for the client

as well, and it's really important that we keep skills up, that we

keep looking at what's new, that we look at better ways that we can do

the websites. And one of the ways of doing that as well is

looking at streamlining. You know, I often have websites that have

five plugins or less and that's including SEO and security and speed

optimizer plugins. So it's really important that we do understand what

we're actually offering for the client and that we are learning this stuff because

this tech is evolving all of the time and it's really important that

you keep up with that as well.

And people said, as well as not understanding the tech and the

security and stuff, that they focus on pretty rather than the

actual important things like conversion and whether

the website's actually getting any leads through it. Because anyone can

design something pretty. If that was the case, we'd all be using Canva websites.

Yeah, because it's great for that sort of thing. But pretty websites don't convert.

Websites which have been put together by a skilled professional with a deep

understanding of the industry, that's what converts.

One of the most hated ones in the web designers industry

is hijacking other people's posts for work.

And someone else said anytime there is a post advertising a

job opportunity, web devs are crawling all over it. Now

I had my own experience with this last week actually looking for a branding

designer and I put A post on LinkedIn said, Could people recommend branding

designers? The post is standing at 15,000 impressions. It's got over

130 comments. I have had people contacting

my personal mobile at home during the evenings. I've had people

contacting my personal email address, people on LinkedIn, people

sending really quite aggressive follow ups as well.

And web designers do this as well. I just personally don't

advertise web designers. If I choose to work with someone, they'll usually be known

to me or they'll always be known to me. And it's a really bad practice,

but it's also a really bad way of getting

work. I mean, on my post I was asking people

to recommend someone they had worked with and someone that they knew rather than people

recommending themselves. And that didn't stop people saying, you know, I would like to

recommend me. It's not a way to stand out, it's not a way to

market your business. You'll find load of resources on this podcast website

websites made simple.co.uk which will help you get

clients for your business. I always say there's A seat at the table for everyone

here, but is learning about which seat you actually want to sit at

and what type of websites you want to be building and which type

of client you want to build them for. Just chucking your pat in

the ring on another web dev's post, not the way of doing it

really. Look at getting your messaging out there and be confident in what you're

putting out there rather than relying on other people's posts because

at the best it will look rude, at worst you'll get blocked

by the person whose post it is.

One bonus one and this is a big one actually in this

industry and it is AI built website sites and

vibe coding. Yeah, let's not do that,

let's not do this at all. Yes, you can build websites using AI. Yes. You

can put a bit of info in there and you get AI to build your

website. Will the website convert? No. Will it bring in leads?

No. Will it be a good representation of your business? No. Will

you get really fed up and lose faith in the website that you've

got? Absolutely, yes. Look, I'll be the first to say you don't need to code

to be a web design designer and I actively

prefer page builder websites because I like clients to

be able to have control of their website and the

only way they can do that. Particularly I work with lots of coaches and

HR professionals and people who are looking at changing their

offers and they want to be able to build their own pages, they want to

edit pages, they can't do that with a hardcoded website.

So you know, we've all got different places that we stand on this. But for

me I'm absolutely fine. As long as people know what the user journey should

be, what the UX experience is on the website, they understand how to

optimize the website, how to actually make it really, really tight

into Google like it, that's fine by me. But vibe

coding, it just, just feels a bit

hipster and it's not a great way to code. AI code is

not good code. I mean sometimes it's okay to chuck something in AI and say

can you debug this for, for me. But I think websites

are still a long way away

from AI giving you the absolute ultimate thing that you

or ultimate result that you want from websites. So I really would

recommend that you get a good old fashioned human in the

website. A human who is building it properly, who is

building. And you know when I said about people had a real issue with

pre builts being marketed as customs, that's not to say, don't use

pre built. If that's where your skill set lies, that's absolutely fine. But don't try

and pretend and pass it off as something that it's not.

Now, if you haven't connected with me on LinkedIn, do come and find me. I'm

Holly C. Christie. If you would like to

add your comments to things in the industry that really annoy

you as a web designer, drop me a line

hello at websites made simple.co.uk or look me up on

LinkedIn and I will look forward to hearing from you. Until next time, see

you again.