 What's up everyone? I'm Jeff from Lightbox. That back there, that's Yoda. He's also from Lightbox. And I got a question for you. Have you ever wondered what is the difference between a five-page WordPress website that costs $500 versus another five-page WordPress website that costs like $10,000 or even more? Well, it actually could be all summed up in just one word or even more like a concept and that is value. If you're new to web design and you're still trying to figure out pricing and the best way to go with it, then just getting started by thinking about value, that's going to change the course and the direction that you go. It will change the way you look at giving quotes to clients. It'll also change the way you look at how you're going to develop your skills. And if you've been around for a while and you've been running your web design business for a while, but you're wondering how do I start to charge more or how do I hire paying clients? Well, really, the right question to ask yourself is how do I start to offer more value in what I do? First, what is value in web design and how do I gauge this? Well, there's all kinds of ways you could offer value and what you do. Even for those brand new, if you're brand new to web design, you still have something within side of you from your life experiences or your own personal values that you could offer and give to your clients. But the real value, it comes in on what you could actually deliver. What kind of impact can you make on your client's business? How are you able to achieve their goals? How can you solve their problems? These are the things we need to start looking at in web design and ways that you can start adding more value. What I'm going to do in this video is I want to introduce you to five areas, five things that you could start doing to add more value in your web design services. Number one, improve your web design skills. Look, if there's no way around this, you got to get good. I mean, this is the basics right here. One thing you got to understand when it comes to design, especially if you're self-taught, myself, I'm self-taught. I had no idea about design and it took time. It took a whole lot of hard work. I had to study. I had to really put in the effort to get good. And the truth is my first couple of years, I wasn't that good. I just barely feel like I'm getting good now. Understand that designers, many of them go to school and they'll go to school for four years and for four years full-time, they're studying design. They're reading about it. They're studying all the different areas. They're practicing and they're learning from taught teachers and professors inside of it. So if you're learning on your own and you want to be self-taught, you got to look at it the same way. Like, how can I put in the same kind of effort, a student that went to school for four years put in? So that's the first step right there. You just got to get good. Push yourself. If you want to get good, look at where the good designers are at. You know, go to dribble, go to be hands, compete with those guys. Look at the top guys right there and keep pushing yourself and learn. You have to get obsessed with design and getting good. So that's step number one. Number two, learn UI and UX. Now you don't have to be a UI or UX designer, but you need to understand it. You need to learn it. You need to know the principles, even the principle of design thinking. This is going to help you and take your web design skills to the next level. Number three, learn how to facilitate discovery meetings with clients. The goal of running a successful discovery meeting is being able to get to the root of the client's problems so you can offer the right solution. See, a lot of the times the clients are going to come to you and they have an idea of what the problem is. They know they have a problem. They feel the pain point, but by being able to ask them the right questions, you can figure out what the real problem is because almost all the time we don't know what it is, not until we dig a little bit deeper, get underneath the surface. By being able to figure out a client's real problem and solve it, that right there in itself can save the client tons of money. It can do so much of an impact in a client's business. You're solving a serious pain point the client has. So that in itself is going to offer so much more value in what you give. Also, it's going to make you a whole lot more valuable and worth a whole lot more. Number four, start thinking strategy. This is a follow-up to being able to run a discovery meeting because you're actually thinking strategy when you start to look for solutions for clients. Now a client, they could come to you and say, this is what we need done. And for my first years, I was an order taker. I'm sure many people watching this also are order takers. And what an order taker is, is somebody that a client comes to and says, do this, do this, do this, do this, and you just do it. And they keep saying, do this, and you just do it, and that's it. There's no value in that. Like there's none. The value comes when the client comes to you and says, I have a problem. And you say, well, let's figure out what the problem is. Okay, here's your problem. Let's go ahead and do this. Let's find a solution to this problem. Let's create a game plan. Let's make something actionable. See, now you're getting in the world of strategy. You're starting to think. And this right here, by being able to think strategy, think design, think how to solve problems with design, man, that value right there, you can actually get paid a whole lot for it. Once you start to get to this level, you start to become worth a whole lot more. And let me tell you something, when you can solve problems by thinking, being strategic, and you start to get to that level, you're going to be able to solve much bigger problems for clients that is going to impact their business greatly. And number five, start charging more so you can do more. Man, this one's important right here. Look it, if a client only gets $1,000, there's not much you can do. You need to raise your prices because the more the more the bigger budget the client has, the bigger their budget, the more you can actually do for them. If the client has $10,000, imagine just just imagine. Remember the question I had in the very beginning, what is the difference between a five page website that's $500 and a five page website that's $10,000? Now, the five page website that's $500, in order to be sustainable, taking on a job that's only $500, you have to do it really fast. You have to get through it quickly, like within a couple of days, two, three, four days max, in order for it to be worthwhile. And then you have to get a lot of those kind of jobs. Now, if you only got two, three, four days to put into building somebody's website, there's not much you can really give to them, but a really quick and cheap website. That's the only value to offer. Now, if a client has $10,000 for a five page website, imagine what more you can do. Imagine the time you could take putting together a proper discovery session with them. You could do things like building user personas, finding out more about their target market and the design process, you could start to utilize and use UI, you could build wireframes, you could take more time and put in more care, more thought and give your client much better chances of hitting their goals, getting their return on investment and solving their problems. This is the value right here. This is the difference. And the only way to get there though is you do have to charge more money because if you're still charging a little bit, you're not going to be able to do much. I really hope this helps out. I hope that being introduced to the idea and start to thinking about value can help you go forward. It changed, it changed my career path. It changed everything once I was introduced to value. And it took me a few years until I was introduced to it. But when I was, it changed the way I look at things. It is a mindset because you start to look at how can I give more. And that's the trick right there. That's the secret. Well, it's not a secret. It's not a trick. It really isn't. This is open. It's such a give and take because the way you get more, the way you earn more is by giving more. And when you're giving more value to a client, they're actually earning more and then you're earning more. So that's it right there. Learn how to add more value to your services. There's a whole lot of ways you can do it. This video just, it's an introduction and it gives you a few key areas that could really help you out. Areas that helped me out and really brought my career to a whole other level. Well, that's it for this video. We got more coming up. So please like, subscribe, do all that cool YouTube stuff, you know, where a new channel can use the support and let me know your thoughts. Go ahead and drop them in the comments. If you could think of other ways to add value as a web designer, also drop them in the comments. So the other new designers that are watching this can't even learn more. That's it for tonight. Thank you.