Whether you are a budding website designer or just like to find out more about what I do in a day then read on where. I tell you what it’s like for a day in the life of a website designer.
The first thing that I want to say is every day is different! When I first started creating websites as a business back in 2015, I was working during the day and creating websites in the evening. When I left my job most days were the same. I was in the house and inbetween household chores I was creating websites, it soon turned into doing less chores and more websites!
I was also doing a lot of networking and luckily as I was part of quite a few networks as the only website designer I got lot’s of work with minimal effort. I just had to turn up and chat and the work came in.
Websites then expanded into support and then training and this is when things became a bit more hectic, especially as the support increased as it was hourly work and mostly around the clock.
Nearly 10 years into my website business journey things are a lot different, it’s not always plain sailing and things can get very crazy very quickly so let me tell you what things are like in a typical day if I’m in the office.
An office day in the life of a website designer
When I wake up the first thing I tend to do (after getting dressed etc.) is to go for a walk. I spend most of my day sat behind a desk so I try and get at least a 40 min walk in before I have breakfast, a quick clean of the house and drive to the office.
Luckily the office for me is only a 5 minute drive away or a 30 minute walk, so sometimes if the weather is nice I walk there and home.
The first thing I do is set myself up for the day, so having a quick check of my emails and creating my to do list for the day – which can change by the hour! I have my wonderful team to keep it updated and as we all share a todo list online, a lot of the support work get’s done by them so I also keep a list of things I’m working on on my desk.
Mostly my office days consist of more Zoom calls than actually work. Client catch up calls to go over where we are and make tweaks, training group and one to one calls and of course the ever popular discovery call. Mainly my calls days are Tuesday and Thursday but if I’ve got a few website clients on it may be more. Calls are usually 10.30am until 3pm, with a break for lunch.
Inbetween calls I obviously have lunch as well as working on websites or helping out with any support work. Once my calls finish I usually have a further hour in the website to keep on top of the websites we are doing, as well as an hour before my calls start.
If it’s my turn to make food in the evenings (me and my husband do every other day) then I’m usually home after my calls finished to prepare the food. We cook everything from scratch and with 5 adult children living in the house, as well as myself and my husband, it requires a lot of meal planning! My husband loves to cook whilst I tend to use my Thermomix, which is a life saver as I just choose plan in the recipes for that week so I can just click the screen, pull out the ingredients needed and the machine does the rest of the work, beeping when I need to add an ingredient – so I can just carry on with client work and a general clean up of the house before everyone else comes home.
As a team, we can be working from anything from 1-8 website builds and numerous support hours from numerous clients. We work from a list, in order of when they email with their requests, but we often get in urgent things such as sites going down, hacks etc. which is then mainly done by myself.
A non office day in the life of a website designer
If I’m not in the office I’m either out with. aclient (although they also come to the office for meetings and trainings) but more often than not I’m at a networking event, which is where I get most of my business, after referrals. I also LOVE networking, I’m such a people person and love nothing more than being with other people. Not just to build my own business and make connections but to learn more about what everyone else does, so I have plenty of people to refer when my clients ask, I especially love the events that involve food 😂
If they are not all day events, I’m usually in the office before or after, where then it’s similar to the above.
I try not to work evenings or weekends, but it depends on the workload and I am trying to fit in more time to grow my own business, such as planning blogs, social media, learning more and keeping up to date with new things in the website world (such as AI). Although I do find I get smaller tasks done quicker in the evening whilst watching a re run of one television show or another. I don’t tend to watch TV otherwise, preferring to go up to bed around half 9 to read for an hour.
I also keep in touch with the team (especially Sara Roddis who is my right hand woman!) so that we all know what we are doing and getting things done to a high standard as quickly as possible.
I love how every day is different and a lot of days, apart from a few support hours already booked in, we often have no idea where the day is going to take us or what work will get emailed through (which it does regularly every day) – great for my ADHD brain!
Before having a team, even a year ago, the majority of my day would be spent answering emails and doing support and I was doing the website creation in the evenings to try and keep on top of things. With regular breakdowns and exhaustion!
But recently I went on my first holiday for a whole week where I never even had to work at all and everything carried on as normal, with no massive pile of work to come back to.
It was amazing!
For some reason, as humans, we seem interested in other people’s lives so if you want to know more about myself and the teams days in the life of a website designer as well as weeks, along with website tutorials tips and all the latest website news then sign up to my Weekly Website Wisdom email newsletter: