At the Future of Web Design in London, Ryan Carson grabbed Paul Boag for a quick chat. We covered the “demise of the website”, important tips for web designers and how to sell your design skills.

Here are the major takeaway points from the interview:

1. We’re approaching the “demise of the website”. Your website is no longer your only route to your customers. You should be publishing your content and entering conversations in as many channels as possible including: AudioBoo, Twitter, FaceBook and FriendFeed.
2. Biggest tip for web designers: Learn how to “sell yourself”. This means you need to be comfortable selling your skills and ideas to potential customers. A large part of this is healthy self-promotion.
3. It’s important to never fool your customers, even if the end-game is honorable. A great example is IE6update.com. It essentially uses JavaScript to trick users into upgrading from IE6 to the latest version of Internet Explorer. In general that’s a great thing, but tricking people to do it is deceitful. This lesson applies to sales and marketing - never try to fool people - they’ll always find you out.

If selling yourself and healthy self-promotion are key to being a successful web designer, what’s the best way to do it? Please give us your thoughts in the comments.

Photo credit: flickr.com/photos/kurafire

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