The Fake Web Designer Economy: How “Six-Figure Designers” Are Selling a Dream, Not Websites

If you’ve spent any time on Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube lately, you’ve probably noticed something strange.

Everyone is suddenly a “six-figure web designer.”
Everyone has a perfectly polished brand.
Everyone claims they cracked the code — and now they want to teach you how to do it too.

And oddly enough… they all seem to tell the same story.

“I used to do web design. Then I found this amazing platform. Then I stopped doing client work and started selling templates, kits, or courses. Now I make more money than ever — and I’ll show you how.”

That story isn’t organic.
It’s manufactured. And we have seen it before with real estate, digital marketing and more.

This Isn’t a Web Design Boom — It’s a Sales Funnel

Here’s the uncomfortable truth no one wants to say out loud:

A large percentage of people calling themselves “web designers” online today are no longer web designers at all.

Some never were.

Their income doesn’t come from:

• Building real client websites
• Ranking sites on Google
• Managing hosting and performance
• Doing technical SEO
• Supporting businesses long-term

Their income comes from selling the idea of becoming a web designer.

Courses.
Downloads.
Template kits.
Coaching programs or seminars on selling the dream of being a “six-figure web designer” to you.

The product isn’t web design.
The product is the dream.

Why This Scam Works So Well Right Now

Modern drag-and-drop builders — especially platforms like Showit(I am using this example bc it seems to be the one all these amazing looking web designers I kept seeing paid ads for were using when I dug a tiny bit deeper into their amazing looking profiles and their amazing rise from apartment and Hyundai to mansion and Ferrari SUV in no time — they make it very easy to look successful without ever doing real work. They are selling the dream to web designers or people who want to be. Just like the ‘digital marketer” scam that was going around last year where they claim to sell you how to be a digital marketer but you then get on live and just try to resell the package you bought on someone else’s live, the only thing you market is the dream of becoming a digital marketer but then you never market anything else or even learn how to actually be a real digital marketer. It’s exactly like that! Showit is a DIY that markets to “designers” and the others before were just marketing as DIY site builders to the business owners directly.)

You can:

• Create stunning mockups
• Never launch a live site
• Never manage DNS, hosting, servers, databases, CMS
• Never touch SEO
• Never deal with performance issues
• Never rank anything on Google

But you can still:

• Sell templates or should I say resell templates
• Sell “how I scaled” courses
• Sell mentorship programs

Visual polish replaces technical competence — and most people don’t know the difference.

Mockups Are Not Websites

This is one of the biggest red flags.

Many of these “designers” showcase:

• Brand boards
• Device mockups
• Landing page concepts
• Figma or Canva designs

But when you look closer:

• The URLs don’t exist
• The sites aren’t live
• The domains don’t rank
• There’s no search presence
• There are no long-term client results
• I was hard pressed to even find their web design portfolio websites from when they supposedly were actually web designers

A mockup is not a website. It’s graphic design or Ui/Ux design at best. No real implementation or execution.
A template is not development. Usually it’s one they bought with reseller rights.
A course is not experience. Even if they had real life web designer skills they couldn’t teach them to you real fast with the course they are trying to sell you.

The Digital Marketing Déjà Vu Problem

If this all feels familiar, it should.

This is the exact same model that flooded the internet with:

“Buy my course and become a digital marketer”

When people dug deeper, they realized:

• The “marketers” weren’t marketing real businesses
• They weren’t running campaigns
• They weren’t generating results and conversions
• They were only selling the course or the dream of being a “six-figure digital marketer” to you.

In many cases, once you were inside the program, the next step was:

“Now resell this system and teach others”

That’s not a career path.
That’s a closed loop.

Why Real Web Designers Don’t Talk Like This

Here’s something you’ll notice if you compare real developers to influencer designers:

Real web designers:

• Talk about infrastructure
• Talk about SEO limitations
• Talk about ranking
• Show real customers, real results
• Talk about hosting
• Talk about rebuilds and migrations
• Talk about long-term growth

Fake ones:

• Talk about freedom
• Talk about lifestyle
• Show their amazing lifestyle now
• Talk about “scaling to six figures”
• Talk about mindset
• Talk about templates

One group builds businesses.
The other builds funnels.

Who This Actually Hurts

This doesn’t just hurt aspiring designers — it hurts business owners.

Because businesses end up with:

• Websites built on platforms they’ll outgrow because they can’t do anything professional without root access
• No real SEO foundation
• No ownership or control
• A false sense of progress
• And eventually… a full rebuild when you need to do real SEO

By the time they realize something is wrong, they already have:

1. A DIY platform, hopefully that they did instead of paying someone to product a DIY site for you.
2. A website that you don’t fully own and can’t take with you when you have to go build a real website
3. And now a real rebuild

That’s expensive — and completely avoidable.

The Hard Question No One Asks

If someone claims to be wildly successful at web design, ask this:

Why did they stop doing it?

If web design were truly that easy, scalable, and profitable — why abandon it to sell courses instead?

The answer is usually simple:

• Selling the dream is easier than delivering results
• Selling hope scales faster than client work
• Selling systems avoids accountability

The Difference Between Influence and Expertise

There’s nothing wrong with teaching.

There is something wrong with teaching something you no longer do — or never actually did at a professional level.

Real expertise leaves fingerprints:

• Live sites
• Ranking pages
• Long-term clients
• Proven growth

If all you see are testimonials from people who bought the course — that’s not proof.
That’s marketing.

Final Thought

Web design is not a shortcut to wealth.
SEO is not instant.
And real businesses aren’t built on templates and hype.

If someone is making millions teaching web design — but can’t show real, ranking, live client websites — that tells you everything you need to know.

I don’t sell dreams.
I build foundations.

Let’s talk

— Rhonda Cosgriff Web Designs