There are a lot of San Diego web design companies, from small studios that focus on local San Diego service provider web sites (which I like to refer to as business card websites) to agencies with offices around the country that work on huge web campaigns for multinational corporations. My company, Chapolito, is still a small San Diego website design studio, compared to a lot of the bigger agencies, but I have still had the opportunity to work with a number of large corporations. One of the common misconceptions of the web design industry is that large corporations need to work exclusively with big agencies to complete their projects. The reality is though, that often projects are broken down to small chunks, are completed by a network of collaborating web designers, and operate independently of, but under, the whole working model of the company.
Gone are the days of Mad Men when you can grab the entire advertising accounts of huge corporations and the work is all done in one office. While the shift to distributed workloads are nothing new, I find the mindset often sticks, and it sticks not so much in those that have the large web design accounts, but in the small companies that can play an integral part in shaping and producing the work.
I have been told numerous times that I need to appear like a large San Diego web design company to land large clients and big deals with local corporations. I would argue that the reality is that it has more to do with your proven portfolio and your ability to meet deadlines than the size of your staff. I’m not saying that there aren’t plenty of projects that I simply couldn’t handle by myself, there are, but collaboration has allowed me to take these projects on regardless and complete them to optimum client satisfaction. In regards to landing jobs, there are still some San Diego corporations that don’t understand fully the power of collaboration within the San Diego website design community, but there are many more that do than small studios that think they are adequate to receive these accounts.
What I am not saying here is “give the little guys a chance,” many of my clients already have and keep coming back for more web design work. What I’m trying to relate is that, other San Diego web design studios should not feel that just because we are small that we can’t handle larger projects. There is no shame in bringing in a whole team of freelancers to complete a huge online campaign. This is the future of the way we have been and will be working.
