When offering website design services, there are several services that most website design companies should add-on if they want to get the most out of every client's contract.

Clients will prefer a company that can handle all of these needs at once, because getting all these services from a single source will cut down on costly communication cycles and result in a finished overall project in a much shorter frame of time.

Graphic Design

If you don't have top-notch graphic design skills, hang it up now. Learning how to use CSS, Javascript, HTML and Flash won't help you if your clients need to hire a second provider for graphics. If you're subbing-out the graphic design, that's going to become a big cost that drags your revenues down so far that you'll struggle to break even.

A graphic designer who provides website design services needs to be extremely versatile and skilled. The average amateur just won't have the wide range of flexibility for the average professional web design project.

In fact, it's easier to make it in this industry with mediocre HTML skills, than with mediocre graphical design skills. At least with an A+ grade in graphic design and a C+ grade in putting graphics together on a website, you'll be able to pull in low-budget contracts for small businesses.

Web Publishing Systems

Today, most businesses are aware that they can avoid regular website design maintenance charges by having their site be run by a content management system. You'll need to know how to deploy those systems in order to get those customers.

In short, the days of billing your client for every new photograph or text tweak, are basically in the past.

This is where it helps to have a friendly neighborhood web programmer on speed dial. Not only are there specialty needs that tend to arise when deploying these systems alongside your website design services, but the client will naturally want to call you for upgrades to those systems.

However, you don't really need a programmer for most of these tasks - you just need to spend enough time with those systems yourself, to understand what's involved in carrying them out.

Marketing The Client's Website

Learn about search engine optimization if you want to keep your client's business for the long term. SEO is the most frequently-requested task for any website design service, hands down. If you can't do that task, then someone else will - and that provider might wind up taking your client's next design-related contract from you.

Perfecting The Client's Image

If you learned web design in college, you may have spent many an hour in print design classes asking yourself, "why am I here?" The reason is simple - corporate identity development skills.

Corporate image development skills are still tightly linked with print skills, so that's where you'll learn about all the anatomical parts of press kits, corporate messaging standards, and how to create unity between a business's website design, and their representation in other media.

Corporate image control is also an area that relies heavily on copywriting skills. That, and the strong reliance in the SEO world upon the written word, are two good reasons for you to develop writing skills, or know a great, versatile, and affordable writer, if you're going to offer website design services.