Finding and starting to use a decent graphical web designer was a huge turning point for me as a "web design" company. In fact I never really was a web design company until I started to use a designer. Rather I was a developer doing development with the odd bit of design fudged in where needed.

Now that I use a designer the sites I create for my customers are in a different league to what I was doing before. Not only is the end result so much better, but I have more time to do what I am best at — coding and building the site.

This coding process usually involves taking whatever the graphic designer came up with and translating his vision in to browser-ready HTML and CSS. This is often a time-consuming and painful process. That's why, to free up even more of my time, I've started having somebody else do this bit. Not only can I now forget about the quirks of the browser and exactly which way to float a positioned div, but I make more money can pass on savings to the customer as the HTML guy's day rate is less than my own.

Such are the number of browser quirks that there now exists people who make a living out of knowing about them all and being able to easily turn a page mock-up in to cross-browser standards-compliant HTML and CSS. Rather them than me.

All that's left for me to do is slice all this HTML up, plug it in to Domino and make it come alive with functionality. The fun bit I guess.

Part of my job satisfaction comes from knowing I've created something that I can sit back and look at thinking "Yeah, I made that!". That's why I'd always worried that I wouldn't get this feeling if so much of the creative process was out of my hands, but that's not been the case at all. I can still look with pride at sites I've worked on where all I did was code the back-end. Even when I'm not the designer it's still quite a hands-on process in managing other people and making sure the customer gets what the customer wants.

Damn, did I just refer to myself as a manager!?