Five Questions With: Andrew Clemente

Andrew Clemente is a 23-year-old freelance Web designer and developer from Warwick. Clemente, who has been freelancing consistently since he was 15 is the founder of Astereo Studio.

Clemente was named “Young Entrepreneur” in 2008 by the National Federation of Independent Business and a “Big thinker” at the University of Rhode Island in May 2012, where he graduated with a degree in entrepreneurial management.

Clemente talked to Providence Business News about his “Summer of Small Business” initiative, the Web design field and the importance of a strong website for businesses.

PBN: Where did you get the idea for the “Summer of Small Business”?
CLEMENTE:
The “Summer of Small Business” initiative is a concept I thought up one afternoon while trying to figure out my best plan of attack for freelancing work this summer. I had interviewed at a few design agencies but kept coming up short, mainly because of how picky I tend to be. As someone who, despite my age, has been doing this for about 10 years, I’m not as open to going to just any agency where all that experience is essentially viewed as meaningless just because most of it has come in the form of freelancing. So instead I decided to focus on how I could improve my business and in the process hopefully help more local businesses. I came up with the ambitious idea of working with 10 clients during the course of the summer, spending roughly 7-10 days per site. I wanted a way to incentivize this as well, so I decided at the end of the summer I would select one client to receive a full refund for the work performed.
Once the idea was conceived I quickly registered the domain summerofsmallbusiness.com which still happened to be available and I put together a one page landing site for the project and began marketing it.

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PBN: What’s the story behind the name Astereo Studio?
CLEMENTE:
Music is a big part of my creative process – there are very few times when I’m designing or coding something where I don’t have music playing in the background. When I was 15 and trying to determine an actual domain to purchase and what name to do business under, I went with “astereo” because it had been my username on many developer communities. I also at the time wanted to focus on creating sites for musicians. Knowing what I know now about business I definitely would have went with a stronger, more meaningful name, but once I started working with clients and putting out some larger-scale projects, the name stuck and I’ve continued to run with it since.

PBN: Why is a strong Web presence important for businesses?
CLEMENTE:
I believe many businesses still view having a website as more of a luxury than a necessity, and it’s that line of thinking that allows for great opportunities at attracting new customers to be lost. When someone is searching for something, their likely pulling out their phone or tablet nowadays, not paging through a phonebook. You do not need to be selling anything online either for a website to be valuable to you. Instead it is meant to be a marketing tool aimed at increasing exposure and retaining the customer relationships you already have, as well as improving them. With a well build and organized web presence, especially when combined with social media, you can connect with customers on an entirely new level — from simply offering occasional updates to providing other useful and relevant information related to your industry, and even offering special offers. When combined with social media integration, the potential to drive new business is not to be overlooked.
Business owners should also understand that maintaining a website is not as daunting as it may seem. I set my clients up with a very easy to understand content management system that is no more difficult then writing a Word document to use. Combine that with the platform’s mobile apps (for iOS and Android) and you could literally be updating your site from anywhere. I also try to automate as much as I can to limit the amount of updating by hand required to keep a site fresh. Of course their are also plenty of instances where regular updating is not even required (depends on what the client has in mind), allowing you to “set it and forget it”, letting the site be a natural marketing tool.

PBN: What are the most important aspects of a good website?
CLEMENTE:
For me, good web design is all about simplicity, organization, and usability. You can have all the bells and whistles you want but if a visitor can’t figure out how to navigate your website or it doesn’t work correctly on mobile devices, you have failed. I try to put together sites are both clean and professional, while at the same time being tailored to that of the industry of the business I’m working with. Every site I build starts from scratch, and the design direction comes from me putting myself in the customers’ shoes and imagining what would make the most sense for each client on a case-by-case basis. Accessibility and speed are also very important in a world where people expect results instantly.

PBN: Do you have any advice for people thinking of going into web design?
CLEMENTE:
Web development is something just about anyone can get into. I’m entirely self-taught and the way I learned was simply by poking through source code of websites to eventually understand how HTML and CSS worked. There are thousands upon thousands of tutorials, and HTML and CSS can be learned fairly quickly. From there you get into more advanced programming like PHP, JavaScript, and etc, but the basics to get you going are fairly straightforward.
When it comes to actually entering the industry, you have to find ways to differentiate yourself. Being a freelancer such as I am gives the ability to work with people across the globe, but there are millions of others doing the same thing as you, so it all comes down to how you market yourself. I try to market the fact that with me, a client actually knows who they are working with – a site isn’t split among five team members like they are at most agencies, and when a client has a question they are asking the person directly responsible for making changes instead of a custom service rep who will forward emails until they finally reach the person responsible for the work.
Web development as a whole is essentially a subset of computer programming, and as the Code.org project states, there is and will continue to be a shortage of programmers. Whether you decide to freelance or work for a company that needs someone full-time to manage their web presence, the industry is only going to continue to grow as more and more functions of businesses move to the cloud.

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