35 Web Design Business Ideas You Can Start Today [2023]

I went straight into work after leaving high school and my first few roles were in sales which have helped enormously in starting this business. Sales quickly teach empathy and understanding and give you a fast introduction to the hard commercial realities of running a business.

Although I learned a lot, I quickly realized that working in sales wasn’t my calling and so taught myself to be a web developer by reading tutorials online and signing up for an overpriced distance learning course. This was before the time of online code schools, I think it’s a lot easier to become a developer these days there are some great online coding schools and also some great free tools such as Codecademy to get started with. After that, I worked at a number of large agencies in London. Again, I learned a lot and gained valuable experience, but I also wanted to focus on helping brands that didn’t have million-pound budgets. My ambition then became to start my own business combining ‘big agency’ experience with simple, intuitive platforms, to help democratize what can be a very expensive and inaccessible agency process, and to help eCommerce businesses to thrive.

I began my business career with the family in-store sampling business, C.A. Courtesy, in the 1990s, while at the same time attending college at Johnson and Wales University, where I pursued a degree in Web Management & Internet Commerce.

I’ve always had a knack for marketing and technology, and when I left C.A. Courtesy, I was the Vice President of Marketing and Technology.

People don’t remember what you say as much as they remember how they felt when you said it.

I launched The Budget Savvy Bride in May of 2008, shortly after becoming engaged. I was working in my first post-grad job as a graphic designer for a marketing company that produced wedding magazines and bridal shows. Between my day job and planning my own big day, I was fully immersed in the world of weddings. I quickly realized that the entire wedding industry seemed completely focused on a certain image and scope of a wedding day– and it was an idea that seemed completely out of reach and unattainable for me.

Be willing to try new things, jump aboard new social platforms, engage with your audience in new ways. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket, and diversify your revenue streams and your traffic sources.

Most publications and magazines really seemed to assume that couples were working with these gargantuan budgets for their wedding celebration, with the cost of the supposed “average” American wedding rising each year. It just didn’t sit right with me.

I started QuestionPro back in 2005. In fact, I bootstrapped it for the first couple of years - which is code for - I was working my day job and working on developing the core software behind QuestionPro during nights and evenings. One day, in the fall of 2005 I returned home from work, I can even tell you what time it was, 6:30 in the evening. I looked at my wife - Kalpana while we were cooking dinner when something just clicked, at that moment I said, “Honey I am going to quit my job and I am going to run QuestionPro full time. I’m done.” She looked at me with a sense of bewilderment, horror, and pride. “But what about our mortgage?” - was her next statement. My answer was - “Well - we’ll figure it out. I have 6 months of savings” - to which she said - “Ok cool.”

My biggest reason for quitting my day job was not actually money, it was the freedom. Freedom to do what I wanted. Freedom to pursue a technical strategy that I saw fit for the company. Freedom to experiment with business models. Freedom to create new ideas. Freedom to engage with customers and create value for all of us. Freedom to take a put my ideas to practice.

Ask anyone who has quit their day job towards the pursuit of entrepreneurship - and you will almost universally get the same answer - the best decision ever. Universally. I hardly know anyone who does not get an adrenaline high by going down the entrepreneurship route. Yes - it is hard - it requires that you work almost 3X of what you could coast by - but the intrinsic rewards are 10X more. In fact, it's hard for most folks, including me, to imagine working a normal 9-5 job anymore.

My academic background has always been focused on management and strategy, I did economics, a PGDip in European Companies Management, and an MBA in England. Once I finished these studies, I started to work in Barcelona as a product manager for a couple of large companies. These were very well-known and large companies and, although I was in my twenties and I had achieved a relevant position in both companies but, for me, it was a waste of time.

At that time you could not expect to have a minimum influence in companies where all marketing decisions are always made in central offices, always abroad. Unfortunately, Spanish companies produced few goods and they merely buy and sell products manufactured in other countries.

I wanted to see all processes and, above all, feel that my efforts were worth something real and touchable. That’s why I decided that if I wanted to put into action everything I had learned, I should build my own company.

My previous business was a consulting business for companies looking to outsource their call center operations. While I appreciated this experience, I found it difficult to build and maintain client relationships. Because of this, I was always on the lookout for a more meaningful career. What I had always wanted to be a business that could really change peoples lives and hearing stories from our clients now when they come back from their trips really feels good, especially when you enable someone to make that trip of a lifetime or a dream trip they had always wanted to do with their kids. Hearing those stories is what keeps us going to this day.

While on vacation in Puerto Vallarta, I had the opportunity to attend a timeshare presentation in exchange for a $2,000 discount on my hotel stay. While the discount was nice, the whole experience of sitting through the presentation and the sticker shock I got when they offered me the timeshare for $60,000 was not.

When I left, I thought to myself, wouldn’t it be nice to get the same $2,000 discount on EVERY trip I take without having to sit through these presentations? If the hotel has the ability to hand out those discounts to presentation attendees, there must be other hidden discounts as well.

Prior to Finty, I was the Vice President of Ebusiness at OCBC Bank. I worked on different financial products and my job was to push their take ups through digital channels. I saw a growing trend in consumer behavior change towards the application of financial products. Similar to eCommerce, people want to do it fast, convenient, any time of the day.

Together with two other close friends, Jeremy and Lucius, we started Finty. We believe there is a need to easily let consumers compare and apply. In summary, simplifying financial decision making. There were a few competitors when we first started, and in order to catch up, we focused on our operating model. We maintained a lean internal structure and enhanced the process through automation. With this, it allowed us to give value back to customers through Finty rewards as a differentiate among other players in the market.

Left to right: Kwok Zhong Li, Jeremy Lim, Lucius Young

So, it all started back in 2011. I had finished my Master's degree in Australia and came back to the US. The Great Recession of 2008 had just ended, but I didn't have a job as the economy was in bad shape, and the market was not good. At the same time, Pete was struggling as well in regards to working two full-time jobs, 16-18 hours a day. Pete was working at SAS and had realized that he wanted to do something bigger, build something of his own.

Pete and I met through one of our mutual friends but little did we know that we will become such great friends and business partners.

One day Pete called me very randomly and asked if I want to start a company. "Wait. What?" I was both excited and confused. I always had a dream of starting my own business and put my marketing knowledge to work. But, both of us didn't have any experience in building a business initially.

I had spent my whole adult life after college living in Los Angeles working in the entertainment industry, first as an actor, then in production (Greenstreet Films) and talent representation (Endeavor and 3 Arts). After years in the business, I got frustrated with how long it took to get movies made and wanted a change.

A friend of mine was working in wealth management at UBS in Beverly Hills and got me an interview. I was always trading stocks since college and envisioned myself as Bud Fox from Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, where I would one day grab some whale clients and make millions managing money for them. My salary tripled overnight from my Hollywood assistant salary and I quickly aced my Series 7 and was on my way.

The year was 2008, the beginning of the financial crisis. I remember being sent to UBS headquarters in Weehawken, NJ for training in the same week that Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers were on the verge of bankruptcy. It wasn’t a good sign. They ended up laying off all the young advisors and towards the end of 2009, I was unemployed and jobless. I moved back to NYC to try and find a job on the institutional side of Wall St.

The idea I had in mind when starting HeraCloset

People have become impatient and want quick results from everything in their lives. This is because of all the gadgets and rapidly advancing technology that have engulfed our lives. Customers want high-quality service that is efficient and does not waste their precious time. It is this thinking that gave birth to the concept of HeraCloset in my mind.

It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.

Our product is a website. The process of designing and developing it was very similar to designing and developing any website or an information system. As both I and the other main founder were software developers, this part was pretty straightforward for us. However, we still did some things pretty right and some things pretty wrong.

The funny part about any SEO-based business is that you can’t really make decent planning. Do you plan to improve some parts of your website and grow? Well, good luck with that, almighty G can have completely different plans for you.

What we made right was a decision to create a system that models all the relations and information about online casinos as structured data. As an example: almost every online casino has a list of countries from which it doesn’t allow residents to play. To capture this information we have created a database table casino_restricted_country and fill it with 1 record for every casino and every country that is on its restricted list.

• Colton Bollinger founded Jumper Media in 2016, and it now assists over 3000 small businesses in using social media to tell their stories.
• He established this business to assist companies in using Instagram to build brand awareness.
• After working with more than 15,000 brands, influencers, and small businesses, he modified the brand strategy in 2020.
• The founder established a team in the Philippines to boost audience reach, engagement, and sales for more than 1600 businesses on Instagram in less than six months.
• Colton has received recognition for his Instagram-focused marketing strategies in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Yahoo.

Listen to the full podcast on podcasts.apple.com ➜

With $12,000 and a mascot named Snoo, two former college roommates designed a web site they hoped would become "the front page of the Internet." Today, despite growing pains, personal issues and persistent trolls, Reddit has over 300 million monthly users and is valued at 1.8 billion dollars. Recorded live in San Francisco.

Hi there! I’m Deyan Georgiev and I’m one of the founders of Techjury.net. If you haven’t heard of it, this means I have more work to do.

Although this strategy led to a (very) slow start, we are now making $30,000/month in revenue. This was achieved by a very small team that today consists of 13 people. We help over 200,000 people a month find the best software and products for them, their families, and their business.

• Andrew Allemann, a Seattle-based entrepreneur, established his company Domain Name Wire in 2015 - a news website focusing on WordPress, web hosting, and the domain name sector.
• Andrew has been working in the domain business since 1997. He has been quoted in numerous prestigious publications, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, Washington Post, Bloomberg, Sydney Morning Herald, NPR, Fortune, and Guardian.
• Through Domain Name Wire, he attempts to offer guidance on technology-related media issues ever since the company was founded in 2005.
• Domain Name Wire provides advice to businesses on domain name selection.

Read the full story on internetx.com ➜

Hi everyone! I’m Lindsey Allard, originally from Boston and currently living in New Hampshire. I started PlaybookUX just over 3 years ago. Our goal was (and still is!) to help businesses quickly get feedback on their digital assets.

We achieved profitability within the first year of business. As of early 2022, our revenue was $150k/month, and currently, we have 1,100 customers.

I’m Codie Sanchez, and I am the Founder and owner of Contrarian Thinking. Our mission is to free minds and build the bank accounts of our readers. Specifically, we strive to help one million people become financially, philosophically, and physically free.

We currently have over 100,000+ newsletter subscribers and a community of over 1.5 million people across our social media platforms with a run rate of $3m this year.

My name is Nick and I’m the founder of Qoders Family. Qoders Family is a family of different services & products all dealing with different aspects of website building.

Other than that we have multiple free WordPress Plugins that have been downloaded more than a few hundred thousand times, and a coffee blog, which is my current passion project. What can I say? I love drinking coffee!

Hello, my name is Ferenc Denes and I have 40+ websites with a total of roughly 8-10 million monthly visitors. I’m going to share the story of one of my sites that brings $6K per month as passive income.

I’m going to share the story of my online HTML editor at htmlg.com. This online text editor converts documents to HTML. It helps to process and clean the code. It runs in the web browser without installing any desktop program. It has a free demo that allows you to give it a try and learn how it works.

My name is Cody Benedetto and my co-founder is Ryan Serkes. We are the founders of Modern Launch. Our custom software development company works with startups and small businesses to build websites and mobile applications.

• Mobile Application Development
• Website Development & Design
• Custom Software Development

I’m Eduard Stinga, founder of VideoPlasty, a platform for stock animation and GIF images.

Since we launched, more than 600,000 people have visited our platform over the years, with 2020 being our best year so far, the year we finally cleared the first legendary milestone for any startup, registering our first six-figure year with a little over $100k in revenue. And we’re just getting started!

My name is Sean Green and I’m the co-founder of The Sports Gambling Podcast Network and co-host of The Sports Gambling Podcast. In 2011 I hosted the first episode of The Sports Gambling Podcast with my partner Ryan Kramer. At the time I didn’t realize I was starting a business, I just thought I was talking about betting on football with my buddy.

In the following ten years, we’ve grown it from two guys recording their conversation in a garage to a legit sports gambling media empire. We have over 15 shows under our brand, multi-million downloads per year and have reached $30K/month in revenue.

I’m Ty Fujimura, Founder, and CEO of Cantilever Web Design and Development. We work with clients from the International Monetary Fund and IBM to local small businesses and startups. They come to us because they are looking for superior results from their websites, and we deliver that by providing their visitors with an outstanding experience and giving them a reason to come back.

Hello, my name is Jay and I am the CEO of JDAQA, a quality assurance testing powerhouse. We’re a lean, scalable team of senior QA engineers and we work almost exclusively with startups.

Our mission is to ensure that builders can get back to the building, while we handle the bugs. In fact, we’re so passionate about “bugs”, that we donate a percentage of our margin to protecting bugs out in nature.

My name is Georgi Petrov and I am co-founder of WPX. We are a WordPress hosting company, both technologically and financially independent and our main goal is to provide the fastest possible service by having both the fastest server platform and the fastest tech support. We believe this is what our clients need - solopreneurs, online marketers, change seekers, people with some great idea or a cause, who need a fast performing and reliable online presence, but who also are not techies. And indeed they don’t need to be. We do the tech stuff, so they can focus on their ideas.

We started with just 2 people (me and my business partner Terry Kyle) and we are now a team of 100+, we have 11K+ customers all around the globe and a $3M yearly income.