Episode 197: Growing your design business with Webflow with Jennifer Sanjines

Are you practicing and growing your skillset as a designer? Jennifer Sanjines joins this conversation to share how you can grow your design business with a new skill. She also shares how she’s grown her business with Webflow and the efficient experience it has created for her customers. Jennifer Sanjines is a website designer who helps service-based business owners renovate their outdated website and turn it into a beautiful, strategic, online home. She’s also an educator for web designers, teaching them her strategic design process and how to fully build websites using the Webflow platform. Her biz friends have dubbed her the “left-brained creative” for her creative ways to teach the tech side of website design and development to both experienced and brand new designers. She’s a mama to 3 kids through adoption and 1 the “normal” way, and she homeschools all 4 of them. She loves soda water more than coffee and is convinced Oreos and 90s music fix all bad days. Exploring All Design Avenues in Your Design Business As a designer, whether brand, graphic, or web, you’ve likely established a service niche that you want to serve. Growth in your business doesn’t just come from new clients, but also in exploring different avenues in your skillset through design. Rather than limiting yourself to what you know and turning away business because you’re not comfortable with it, Jennifer encourages designers to explore all avenues to truly understand their skills and talents to see where they thrive. Mistakes to Avoid When Adding Web Design to Your Services 1. Piece-milling a package together. Putting together what your clients want is so much more important than just doing what other designers are doing. 2. Not understanding how all of the pieces of content fit together. 3. Not understanding general design best practices. How to Challenge Yourself as a Designer Building confidence as a designer comes with time, but it also comes with practice. The best way to challenge yourself is to give yourself a fake client, outside of your ideal client. There are so many different ways to practice your skillset by creating fake work. You could recreate something you saw for practice (not for resale) or pick a company to build a website for. When you focus in on how things fit together without the back and forth with a client, it becomes really helpful. Building Websites on Webflow While Jennifer didn’t start her business with Webflow, she took time to explore the platform to see if it was a good fit for her clients. Ultimately, thinking of her clients is what pushed her to move to Webflow. Clients have to come first, despite your preferences. With keeping the client in mind, many of her clients were coming back for updates rather than doing it on their own like they originally thought. Webflow has an amazing feature, called “Editor” that allows clients to edit features of the site that you as a designer set the permission for them to edit. The features of Webflow essentially helped Jennifer build out a service for her customers that served them best. Catch the Show Notes Get to Know Jennifer (2:23) Exploring All Design Avenues in Your Design Business (6:34) Adding Web Design Services to Charge More (10:26) Mistakes to Avoid When Adding Web Design to Your Services (16:42)