5 Website Design Tips I’d Give Any New Designer Before Their First Client

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When you’re brand new to website design, almost everyone hands you the same advice. Build a beautiful portfolio. Pick a niche. Find your aesthetic. All of that has its place.

But there are a handful of website design tips I wish someone had told me in plain language before I took on my first client. The honest notes that would have saved me a lot of second-guessing.

After 15 years of design work and more than 700 custom website projects, here are the website design tips I’d actually give a new designer sitting across from me with their first project on the horizon. None of it is hype. It’s just the truth about how this work tends to go in the beginning, and why it’s so worth staying with.

1. Your First Clients Will Be Low Budget, or No Budget

I want to set this expectation gently, because it trips up so many new designers.

Your first few clients are usually not the dream-budget projects you see other people posting about. They’re friends, referrals, the small business down the street, someone who believes in you before you have much to show.

That’s not a sign you’re doing it wrong. It’s the normal starting line.

So charge what you reasonably can, but don’t wait for the perfect client to begin. In the early days, the real return on a project isn’t only the fee. It’s the reps, the portfolio piece, the testimonial, and the confidence that comes from finishing something real. Those things compound. The budgets grow later, once you have proof and a process behind you.

2. You Have to Go After Your First Clients

Here’s the piece most new designers quietly hope isn’t true: you can’t build a beautiful portfolio site, sit back, and wait for the right people to discover you. Not at the start.

In the beginning, you go to your clients. You tell people what you do. You reach out, you offer, you ask. You message the business owner whose website is holding them back and start a conversation. Visibility comes before reputation, and reputation is what eventually brings clients to you.

This part can feel uncomfortable, especially if you’d rather let the work speak for itself. But there’s nothing pushy about offering something genuinely helpful to someone who needs it. Think of it less as selling and more as raising your hand so the people who need you can find you.

3. Your First Few Websites Will Take Longer Than You Expect

I’m going to be honest with you here, because I think honesty is the kindest thing I can offer.

Your first projects are going to be slow. They’ll take roughly three times as long as you planned, and at some point you’ll look at the hours you’ve poured in and think this wasn’t worth it even if you’re using Showit). That feeling is so common. It doesn’t mean you chose the wrong path. It means you’re doing something new, and new is always slow before it’s fluid.

Stay with it anyway.

I think about this the way I think about rebuilding strength after surgery. For a long time I assumed full push-ups were simply too hard for me, so I always defaulted to the easier version. Then one day, after months of quiet, consistent work, I tried a real one and realized the thing that once felt impossible had become possible. Nothing dramatic happened. The reps had just been adding up the whole time.

Website design is the same. You get faster. You stop reinventing the wheel on every project. Your systems take shape. The slowness of those first projects isn’t wasted time. It’s tuition, and it pays you back for years.

4. Borrow Proven Systems Instead of Inventing Every One Yourself

If there’s one thing that shortens that slow, humbling stretch, it’s this: you don’t have to figure out every system on your own.

So much of what makes a project drag in the early days has nothing to do with design talent. It’s the parts no one warns you about. How to price the work, how to walk a client through the process without scope creep, how to set up your files, how to handle revisions, how to deliver and launch cleanly. Those are systems, and systems can be learned.

When you learn from someone who’s already spent years refining those systems, you skip a remarkable amount of trial and error. You get to stand on the work that came before you instead of starting from a blank page every single time.

This is exactly why we built Design Strategy School. It’s the complete, step-by-step system we use to design, price, sell, and deliver strategic brands and websites, drawn from those 15 years of real client work and broken into a framework you can use on every project. If you want to compress the messy beginning and move faster with more confidence, that’s the kind of guidance worth borrowing. You can see all of our courses for designers here.

5. Share Your Work Again, and Again, and Again

This last one might be the most freeing, especially when your roster still feels thin.

You don’t need a long list of projects to look established. You need to take the projects you do have and share them generously, from many different angles, over and over. One finished website can carry your marketing for months if you let it.

Show the before and after. Explain why you chose a particular layout, color, or page flow, because the thinking behind the work is often more compelling than the work itself. And whenever you can, share the outcome. Did the client get more leads, more bookings, more revenue, or simply a site they finally feel proud of? That result is your real portfolio.

So highlight one piece this week, then highlight a different aspect of that same piece next week. The goal isn’t to post a project once and move on. It’s to let each project go as far as it possibly can while you’re building toward the next.

You Don’t Have to Have It All Figured Out

If you’re at the very start of your website design journey, take a breath.

Your first clients will be small. You’ll have to go find them. Your early projects will run long. All of that is completely normal. It gets easier. You get faster. The systems come.

Pick one of these website design tips to act on this week. Reach out to a single potential client, share one project you’re proud of, or look at the systems you keep rebuilding from scratch and decide it’s time to learn a better way. You’re not doing this alone, and you’re more ready than you feel.

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FAQs: Website Design Tips for New Designers