There was once a wonderful time, in which web designers could pretty much do as they pleased, and get away with a lot because their skills were in extremely high demand, and there were only a very few people who had such skills. One could almost compare the salad days of web design to a period where a good web designer was treated a bit like a professional athlete. Of course, nowadays almost everybody can code up a basic site, especially since there are all sorts of different templates available out there. So the skills of a web designer are not nearly so prized as they once were.
In this day and age, if you want to code up websites for a living (and live anywhere but your parents’ basement), you are going to want to work on seriously stepping up your game. When it comes to doing a better job of things like that, your skills have got to be extremely complete and competent to a fault. If you are not extremely competent, you are going to go hungry as a web designer in this day and age. After all, they turned out a veritable glut of highly trained professional webmasters back in the late 90s and the early part of this century.
But how do you post the ultimate websites? First off, listen. Listen to the people who are paying you, and read between the lines when it comes to giving them everything that they want. Nobody who is not expert enough to do something themselves is going to know everything that they want. They might not even know that a particular feature even exists. You can surprise them in a good way.