How I became a web designer (with no experience!!)
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So… how did I become a (super successful) web designer with absolutely no experience?
I remember it like it was yesterday… cozy in my college apartment
Scrolling through the new rage for female university students across campus, we had just gotten access to Pinterest.
I quickly found a ton of bloggers through Pinterest, and one in particular was my favourite, Rosie the Londoner.
She was living the life in London, going to parties, wandering around Notting Hill and traveling around Europe.
🇬🇧 London for me was a dream city and it felt like a world away as I lived in frozen Canada 🥶
I was inspired by these bloggers to create a blog of my own. Page by Paige, a travel blog, was born.
Awful name, but whatever I was to the online content thing, don't judge me.
With a budget to hire a web designer of exactly nothing, I decided to learn. I Googled "how to build a blog"
I tried a bunch of website and blogging building platforms.
WordPress, Google Blogger, Wix and Squarespace.
Squarespace immediately had my heart. It was the easiest to create the idea in my head on the page.
That's when a newfound passion was lit 🔥.
I LOVED creating my blog, redesigning my blog, playing with the settings and styles.
And that's when the lightbulb went off 💡 … If I built and designed websites for others, I could be paid for that. And it'd make money a lot faster than my travel blogging content creator dreams which were notorious for being a longggg game of audience building before any income would be earned.
With a $45k student loan to pay back, web design felt like the perfect side hustle.
While this wild idea sounded like a dream come true, it wasn't without its flaws and I had a lot of fears about how little ol’ me could become a web designer with no experience whatsoever 😬.
These were the thoughts that turned in my head…
I didn't actually study web design, so I don't really have professional experience... or a portfolio
I actually have no idea what UI/UX means
I also don't know how to code. That's not important right?
I'm 20 years old... is anyone going to take me seriously?
*Awkward laughs whilst dyyyinngg inside*
After telling my fears to take a hike, I got down to business. Learning how to build websites really well.
Google, YouTube, Skillshare & a few blogs helped big time. There was no full start-finish course at the time, so it was a lot of piecing stuff together online.
I side hustled as a freelance web designer sporadically getting clients here and there through my 2 years of my masters degree. The real test came when graduation rolled around.
I moved abroad to be with a German guy - yup the cute one in the pics 💕.
My game plan had been to learn German 🇩🇪 and then get a job in my field in what I studied just in Germany.
Buuttt… after spending 3 months in language school and still hardly being able to order a coffee, however, I realized I needed a plan B, I was not going to learn German fast enough before my bank account was going to be drained.
Plan B saw me work as an English speaker in a bilingual kindergarten… perfect for some, but just not for me! After one too many temper tantrums from spoiled 4-year-olds and feeling my brain wasting away and melting inside my head 🤯 as I read The Cat In The Hat for the zillionth time, I quickly determined that wasn't right either.
So I was onto option C. Figure out how to make my web design business a legit thing that paid the bills.
What useful skills did I already have for my new career as a web designer I hear you ask?
I did have a few things inherently going for me when it came to being a web designer. I am organized AF so I could manage a project and process like a boss right out the gate. I also was told before I have an eye for design.
But that's about where my inherent skills stopped and all the things I was missing started…
My first problem was my very meh portfolio.
My few past website projects hadn't exactly been bangers.
Case in point: I genuinely built a website for a retirement home 🧓🏻 once, which I think we can all agree is not exactly inspiring or beautiful or what you think of when you think of a dream design project. I knew however that a drop-dead gorgeous portfolio would seriously go a long way in helping me land ANY client, but ESPECIALLY the type of clients and projects I wanted. That was my first big hurdle to overcome.
Secondly, I also hadn't been incorporating thattt much web design strategy into my projects at that point.
So while my clients indeed had decent looking websites now, they weren't seeing massive increases in sales or inquiries 📈.
I knew that I needed to learn what made a website tick, what elements led to increasing sales and bookings so that I could put together not just portfolio pieces, but case studies.
I knew the most powerful client-magnet would be if I had a case study that showed one of my past clients significantly increased their sales because of the new website which I had built them.
And in order to do that I had to learn conversion best practices, design best practices and website-building strategy.
Interestingly, over time this is something I researched 🖥️ and studied in depth (I got super into it!! 🤓) and the results were wild!
I had one client who had always run a Black Friday sale which did tens of thousands of dollars in sales.
I redesigned the site, and JUST with the redesign and no other changes to their marketing, we DOUBLED 💰💰💰 their Black Friday sales!!!
