Here is a great article written by Danny Rocks (thank you, Danny, for finding my blog and leading me to yours) which starts off with this quote:

“Don’t be irreplaceable.  If you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted.”  —Anonymous

The essence of it is that if you teach others to do what you know how do, then you’re able to move up to the next bigger thing. In other words, the more you coach,  mentor, and help others succeed, the more trust you will build in your bosses, in your peers, and in those who work for you.

I thought about this in relation to my career as a designer. My goal has always been to take the voodoo out of design and web, and make it understandable for my clients. Years ago when the web was in its infancy, and I was busy designing my first full-fledged website for a non-profit organization, I was criticized by a fellow web developer for "giving away too many trade secrets." He was annoyed I had told them about the InterNIC Whois database, where they could look up and register their own domain names without having to pay someone else to do it for them (at the time, it was common to charge someone well over $100 for that "service" which took only minutes and no skill to complete.) Needless to say, he was out of business within a couple of years, and I can only imagine how many former clients he must have pissed off when they found out they were being ripped off.

I once tried to tell a client that going with the cool, expensive all-flash website that another designer had sold them on was a bad idea. I was recommending a regular HTML site with a couple of Flash elements here and there. Besides the obvious issues with all-flash sites, I pointed out that they would be totally dependent on the guy with the Flash source file to make their web updates. Unfortunately, I didn’t convince them to scale it back, but we at least got the flash developer to put the content in XML so that the client could change parts of the content when they needed. (The client ended up going under shortly afterwards during the dotcom crash. No idea what the flash developer is doing now.)

Being a designer is like being a good parent: you want to see your creation go out into the world and succeed on its own merits. Whenever I meet with a client to talk about their website, I try to make it  easy to understand so that they aren’t intimidated by the process, and so they will have trust in my intentions. I always tell them the parts they can do themselves to save money, such as doing their own web updates with Adobe Contribute, or starting up a blog which doesn’t require any designer help at all beyond the initial template design. I’ll always recommend the way that gives the client the most bang for the buck, even when it means fewer bucks for me, because the happier they are with the results, the more likely they are to hire you for something else and recommend you to other people.

A real designer will never be replaced by a piece of technology. The way to make yourself irreplaceable, and to keep clients for the long haul, is to create things that thrive without you.