How LinkedIn can help you on your professional web design path

As a web designer or web developer you may already be using LinkedIn to promote your freelance business, your web design studio or simply to let people know about the experiences you’ve had to date in your web design career.  It’s a great promotion tool for networking which is the “life blood” of all business.  If you are a web designer who has never used LinkedIn to promote or network with people who know you, know your work and speak highly of it then why haven’t you?  After all, it is a free service and it gives you access to people who know people that you know.

LinkedIn has what they call a “Public Profile” which is visible to anyone who searches your name and finds you online.  The thing that makes it great is that you can restrict people from how much information is shown about you, your skills, your education and all those personal details.  A lot of web designers out there have a LinkedIn profile and all of them seem to use it differently.  I wanted to highlight some things that web designers should consider when they use LinkedIn for various reasons that can help them increase their business, land that dream web design job or promote their growing studio.  Most web designers can be categorized into 3 types that include…

Freelance Web Designers – Freelance web designers are usually focused on a couple of things like getting established by taking on web design contracts and building their experience, some are in a career transition from a related field or unrelated field of work and some do it part-time while others freelance full-time.

Career Web Designers – Career web designers are looking to build a career out of their web design skills.  They aren’t necessarily interested in freelance opportunities because they usually work full-time and are interested in job opportunities to advance

Studio Web Designers – Studio web designers are usually looking to build their business or studio with and sometimes without a team of professional designers and developers.  They may have at one point been a freelance or career web designer as well.

Now that we know the 3 general types of web design professionals and you’ve labeled yourself in at least one category of web designer let’s break down how LinkedIn can help you figure out the best way to promote yourself on this social medium.

For all the freelancers out there!

Being a freelance web designer or web developer means that you are probably establishing a client base and you may be working full-time in a related or unrelated field and moonlighting as a web designer or web developer.  There’s nothing wrong with that whatsoever.  Some things I’ve noticed are that web designers or developers who freelance fall into some pitfalls in representing themselves and here are some things you can avoid…

Adding unrelated professions to your LinkedIn profile – This can also apply to your resume but for the purposes of this article let’s focus on LinkedIn.  If you happened to do another job before becoming or in the process of becoming a web design professional that’s okay but when people find you online they don’t want to read that you were a pizza maker in college, not that there’s anything wrong with that.  You want to focus on any work you’ve done for clients and establish timelines for those projects especially if you’re a newly liberated freelance web designer.

If you’ve worked in related positions like a fine artist, a print designer or traditional graphic designer these positions showcase your skills and abilities which you can take forward into your career as a freelance web designer and you should definitely have available when people come by your LinkedIn profile.

Career web designers

There is nothing with choosing to earn your chops as a web designer for a company.  Some of the big added benefits are a salary, benefits, additional training and a steady stream of projects.  Sounds pretty sweet!  Using LinkedIn, as a part of your job search strategy when looking for your next position can give you a chance to develop your job search network and it doesn’t have to take all of your time.

Some things that you will want to highlight are your skills to date and relate it to your experience.  So if you spent 3 years working for a place where Action scripting was a part of the skills you gained on the job highlight that, if you took part in workshops at a college or university promote that.  Remember, you want to get noticed and having a LinkedIn profile that gets you noticed will serve you far better than simply applying to job ads.

Try talking about the places you’ve worked in terms of the projects you’ve been involved in and your specific involvement in projects at past jobs preferably with timelines as to when the project began and when it completed.  This shows prospective recruiters and hiring managers that not only can you code HTML, design PSDs and JavaScript with the best of them but it also tells them as to how you contributed to the team and your involvement in the business.

Some web designers feel very strongly about design awards they’ve received and showcasing them whereas other web designers don’t make mention of them.  In my opinion, if it sets you apart from the competition in a good way then by all means add it because it tells people that you are good enough at what you do to win in a competition but if it’s some obscure design award it may be best to leave it off entirely because of the “WTF” factor (As in “What the f%$k were they thinking adding this?”)

Also for the career web designers another thing to consider is asking previous colleagues for recommendations about the work you’ve done for past companies.  This is a pretty powerful tool should anyone be on LinkedIn and looking for their next superstar web designer and reading recommendations about how great your work is.  Its okay for people to say that they love your work so don’t feel bashful about accepting positive feedback on your LinkedIn profile about your skills!

Studio web designers

What I refer to as “studio web designers” are men and women that design perhaps with another design or group of designers on a part-time or full-time basis.  In most respects they are established with a few years in the design trenches and have started to break off and do their own design as a part of a team either on a full-time or part-time basis.

The first thing is that your motivation for using LinkedIn is different.  Chances are you use it to build your network collectively with other designers and developers in your team based either locally or internationally so you want prospective clients to know that you and your team are serious about what you do so that they call you with their next project.  If you fall into this category then you may want to create your studio as a company in LinkedIn so that all designers and developers involved can link to the organization and in turn boost the power of your network exponentially.

Also, good word of mouth from past and present clients through recommendations can boost confidence in your team of designers and developers so soliciting recommendations from clients who love what you’ve done to help them can go a long way to help.

Despite the type of web designer you are from the kind who is happy working for a company to a web designer just starting out and testing the waters or a seasoned veteran aiming to start a studio with some friends, LinkedIn, can help you land that next job in your career, or get those first few clients while you hone your skills or develop an internationally known design studio.