WatBlog Newsletter Archive: WATBlog Update "Undercutting a Small Pie: Are There a Player Too Many in the Web Design Niche?" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

WATBlog Update "Undercutting a Small Pie: Are There a Player Too Many in the Web Design Niche?" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

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"Undercutting a Small Pie: Are There a Player Too Many in the Web Design Niche?" from "WATBlog.com - Web, Advertising and Technology Blog in India"

Undercutting a Small Pie: Are There a Player Too Many in the Web Design Niche?

A search for web designer India yields 13,300,000 results on Google. That is a huge number, even if 1% of these are quality results we still end up with 1,33,000, which is still a big number. Obviously no client is going to swade through all these results, so cracking a design client on Google essentially becomes a factor of SEO and a good website copy perhaps. Perhaps one fo the reason why web designing as a service is primarily got done through friend references more often than not, a client spoilt for choices usually doesn’t know whom to trust.

I personally don’t have a problem with growing numbers of web designers in India, in fact it is good for the industry. However, a period has to come when the niche consolidates itself, otherwise it will end up cutting the pie into such small slices that no one will find anything to take home. This is an issue most service industries face, especially a growing one like digital media services. The issue is that of price becoming the only competitive advantage over a niche of similarly skilled people. That is when the pie crumbles (if pies can crumble, otherwise we can move on to cookies which is still smaller but crumbles for sure).

Designers usually belong to two prominent breeds the freelance kind and those who go a more entrepreneurial way and set up a web design studio. The studio designers realize quickly that a purely web design service model is hard to scale as a business and introduce other services and products in a bid to comoditize, market and grow. This is where they lose their comptitive edge, the eternal disadvantage of being a one stop shop. Clients might ask for it of course, but what’s your USP if every other firm can set up SEO services along with web design? The threat to is not just from competing companies but from freelancers as well. Given the lack of a regular flow of work unless you are amongst the few to have a huge credibility as a designer, one tends to discount the prices to get as much work as possible. Forums like digital point are filled with cheap quotes from Indian web designers and writers who get a lot of flak from their industry counterparts abroad.Regardless fo the flak and talk, designers usually end up undercutting themselves which in essence is akin to digging your own grave. Not to mention the low quality of work which usually follows a terribly underpaid job.

I call for a consolidation now because it is bound to happen eventually. There is only so much you can have with a price war before you bleed to obscurity and another job. And anyway, a new designer will come on the block who can reduce the price further to enhance his portfolio.

The solution is three pronged:

Build vertical niches - Build verticals within the design periphery. Choose a niche and dig deep instead of digging wide.
Commoditize services- Services can scale only when it is truly mass and standard. Designing and creative services require unique solutions almost all the time, which means it can’t scale like banking or financial services. In the design industry therefore frameworks are products, frameworks that people can build and customize. Create templates and frameworks to make design services a commodity and scale.
Align related services and create tie ups -This needs to flow top down, with the big players taking the lead to associate with smaller ones to outsource or partner in a related service instead of starting a new business vertical. This helps in plugging uncalled for competition besides scaling the industry as a whole.

For instance, as a designer you can concentrate on flash banners or jQuery scripts or PHP plugins for Drupal, Wordpress and the likes as your niche specialization. You can then make custom scripts that a lot of people can use and that sit he framework you build. Bigger design firms with a better market reach can then partern with you for building custom client scripts in your domain instead of sourcing it inhouse. This reduces price competition in general, improves effeciency and product quality and importantly lends a premium tag to your work.

What’s your thought on this? I am not a designer myself, and this is purely an opinion based on observation than research. Do you think I am pressing a panic button without a cause or is this an issue on the minds of many in the industry?