Transcription

VINEETA: Hello? Hello. We’re starting in two minutes so is that okay? Fantastic. So I’ll let Rachel and Meg start in the next two minutes. We’re starting in 1 minute. Okay 30 seconds. Okay I’m going to hand over to Rachel and Meg now, and they’re going to talk about website design pain points for clients how to talk them through it.

MEG: Hello everyone. I hope you’re enjoying the weekend so far. We certainly are. This is our first WordCamp ever, so we’re excited to be here. Our talk is not techy, so I hope you still enjoy it. My name is Meg and this is Rachel, my business partner. We are from Sussex and we run a design and marketing company called Shake it Up Creative. We’ve both been sole traders before as well, and we have over 15 years’ experience with all types of clients. Getting to know our clients and what drives them and their passions is part of our job, and it is something we really enjoy about our jobs. And for me in particular as web designer, it is my job to solve clients’ problems, so I have to work closely with them in order to help them find solutions.

So there is a fair amount of client management involved in what we do, and it is probably the same for a lot of you guys as well. So hopefully you’ll know what I’m talking about there, and we work with other developers and designers too, and the story is always the same. Our jobs would be so much easier if we didn’t have clients, but of course we have to have clients. We wouldn’t have a business if we didn’t have clients.

What do we mean by pain points? It is the concerns that clients have when getting their website built. So it could be anything to do with hosting or domain names, perhaps content, or maybe they’re not even really clear on who their target market is. Also, it could be about costs as well.

Sometimes it is not even about the website at all; it is about maybe an experience that they had previously with another service provider.

RACHAEL: For example, we recently started working with a mobile ice cream retailer, and they had actually already selected their web development partner, but they were concerned about their search engine rankings, and wanted to work with someone that understood they wanted to preserve, what they had, but also build on that and generate more visitors to their site, and they began to discuss some questions, and we talked them through how we would find the right data and how we would use that data, and how we would preserve what they had and build on their traffic over time. We gained their trust and they decide to switch, and we got the contract, and we’ve just built the site, which is brilliant.

Once we’d explained to them how we could do those things as we took that pain point away, they chose us and we got that business, which was fantastic.

MEG: Pain points will be different for every client.

When I was at university in the States, which is where I’m from originally, I took a class in my sophomore year called the philosophy of art 101. It was really intense and we studied Aristotle, et cetera, because actually I really don’t remember very much about that class at all. My main takeaway from that entire year, something that our professor told us, he told us how an artist sees a horse. So if you ask people, picture a horse, they’ll probably see something in their minds like this, an average horse. If you ask an artist, or we could say a designer, to picture horse they’ll see something more. They’ll see the details. They’ll see the muscles beneath the skin. They’ll actually hear the way the tail sounds when it swishes, they’ll see the wind and how it flows behind the neck, they’ll see the nostrils and how they flair. They’ll also see the shadows the horse makes when it moves, and the sheer beauty of this animal. And not just that, but they’ll see how it affects people.

Clients see a website. That’s their average horse. We see everything else. We see more. We see the details. So we see the design, the copy, the HTML, the CSS, the hex codes, plugins, blah blah blah, all that kind of stuff. We see everything and anything that has to do with the website, with user experience, with SEO, with marketing.

Our clients don’t see any of that, or most of them don’t. We could show them this. But that might not be the best idea because they might freak out and say, “Where do I start? I don’t really understand that. What’s going on here?”

Our job is to turn this into something that our clients will love, and be proud of.

RACHAEL: How much does a website cost? Great question. We know the answer. We hear that all the time, but sometimes we have to extract a little bit of information from the client first. What we really need is to get answers for the questions that potential clients don’t even know that they need to ask. We have to listen to them and solve their problems with a solution that also understands the value of their spend.

Even if you have a range of packages, it may not fit their needs. Of course sometimes you actually have to say no to a project, and learning to say no is really difficult.

MEG: How do we help our clients? You got to know your stuff. You got to gain knowledge and share knowledge. And you can do that by networking, talking to other developers, other designers, creators, innovators, by coming to conferences like this, by coming to WordCamp is a great way of gaining and sharing knowledge.

Be part of a business community in your local area. If there isn’t one, then create one. Create a group you can all go to. And share ideas and gain knowledge.

RACHAEL: My background is in marketing and PR, and when I worked in-house with developers they couldn’t see past the code. Not unless I was very specific with them. Their brain naturally focused on the functionality and not the aesthetics. So I learnt to discuss the aims and ideas behind the project, and build their understanding and just like we do now with clients.

MEG: I also put on the screen “confidence”, and I put that in capital letters because being confident in what you do and how you do it is really helpful for clients. Confidence is key here. Your client is looking to you for the answers. They’re looking to you to create what’s in their head that doesn’t exist yet. So you need to have the confidence in order to help them.

So hands up anybody knows what this is. I’m not sure how clear it is on the screen. Okay, it’s fine, it doesn’t really matter. It’s a work of art by Damien Hurst and it’s called Black Sun. I’m just going to give you a quick little story about when I was a kid in school. One day the teacher said everybody is going to draw a picture. What did the kids draw? Something they know, so everyone was drawing a house, a yard, the sky, a sun. I was doing that as well. I looked around the classroom and everybody’s sun was yellow, but my sun was blue because I liked blue. When the teacher came round I started to feel really like oh, everybody else’s sun is yellow, mine is blue. When the teacher got to me, I actually covered up my sun with my hands, and she came to me and looked down and physically pried my hands away from my drawing, and she tutted because I had a blue sun, so that did not make me confident. Your confidence may be knocked from time to time, and you may have your own blue or black sun. But going back to your passion and what you love doing, that will enable you to go from strength to strength and take your business forward. So don’t lose your confidence.

You need to find a balance between demonstrating your expertise and giving succinct explanations. You’ve quoted, you’ve itemised, you’ve nearly won the job. But your clients still have questions. From your quote and your conversations, the client has a better idea of what a website entails and knows that it’s not just a website. Some will want to understand more, others won’t really want to know the inner workings of it. You want to win the contract, of course, and once you do, you will want to build a good relationship with your client. That may have begun before they were even a potential client. Maybe you knew them from networking or something. With web design, you can demonstrate expertise while keeping it understandable. So break down the process for them. Tell them how you start. How you get started. Then what happens next. Then what happened after that. For example, some clients come to us, and even though we do graphic design, some clients come to us with a logo and brand details, all good to go. So we know we can tell them the next step is to focus on the content, the page structure, the page titles, all that kind of thing. Next will come the layout design, then after that the web build and so on. There may be other mini steps in between as well.

You can let them know the processes without getting bogged down with the technical.

RACHAEL: Who finds this question easy to answer? No? That must mean you all find it really tricky, because it is actually really hard to give an answer that’s easy to describe in one brief sentence. But the client needs to know this, and you need to know this, to create a website that serves them well and generates conversions. Help them work it out. Ask questions as if you were the customer. Challenge them to focus and prioritise. You can either consult together or alone, but if you skip this step, this pain point, then you’ll find the content becomes unclear and wishy-washy, and it won’t speak to the target audience.

Asking what they don’t want and what they don’t need and what they don’t like is actually really important. Don’t waste time including things that they’ve just forgotten to communicate to you. Extract the negatives as well as the desirables. We’ve asked this question many times, and the response has always been “Good question. Actually, I don’t want any blue on the website,” possibly, or “We don’t want to use any of those images from the old site, we need a whole fresh photography session booked.”

We wouldn’t know that if we didn’t ask, and it does help avoid disappointment and amends.

Make it clear what you will be doing, and make it clear what they will be doing. When information needs to be supplied, log-ins and content, we will talk a bit more about content later, guide them. Steer them in the right direction. Who is going to be the main point of contact? Break it down into stages, and schedule calls and meetings ahead of time.

It sounds obvious, but sometimes these things get forgotten and deadlines get missed. For larger organisations, we find that having one person as the main point of contact works best. Let them fight out over the options themselves, and come back to you with the answers, and not steal your time away from the project.

MEG: Your job as the designer is to solve problems, and the more you do this, the easier it will become, and the more you’ll have kind of those ready-to-go answers, and the more ideas you’ll have as well. So think of your clients’ challenges as your own challenges, go on their journey with them. Because then you’ll have a better understanding of what they need and what they want, and you’ll be better equipped to serve them.

So just to give you an example, this website here is a site for Headway West Sussex, which is a local charity that supports people affected by brain injury. And the challenge here was to create a website that was going to be understandable to the end user.

RACHAEL: We felt we needed to actually run a focus group. We attended one of their support groups where people that have unfortunately been affected by an acquired brain injury and their carers, or their family, attend and help each other and do activities and support each other.

We learnt there that we should avoid bright white backgrounds, and we toned it down to an off-white colour. We also learned that the curved edges around the boxes would help people digest the information and find things better, and that content in smaller chunks was better for them.

We wouldn’t know those things if we hadn’t have asked. We found the unknown information by running that focus group, as well as including the usual accessibility features like the AA text size.

MEG: Just real quick, this website is actually up for an award. It has been short listed for a digital award in Sussex and we’re really proud of that. Whether we win or not, it doesn’t matter, we were proud that we were chosen because we worked really hard with the client in order to achieve their goals. Here is another example. This website is for artist Carrie Sanderson and she actually built the website herself in WordPress, but she got to the stage in her business where she wanted to take it from a DIY look to a more professional looking website, and that’s where she came to us to help her. So it wasn’t a straightforward site build. We needed to first ascertain what it was she had already achieved, and then what it was she wanted going forward. And there were also cost implications as well.

RACHAEL: It is really important to build a good rapport with your clients and find out what really matters to them and what specific concerns they have. Talk to them and reassure them. They’re not buying a T-shirt in small medium or large. It could be a change of career for them, or it could be a company moving to get clients internationally. It is life, and it is emotions, and it is bigger than a website. So if they feel like they’re a problem, it will dull their enthusiasm for you as a supplier.

MEG: I don’t know if you’ve ever had this, but we’ve had clients cry because they’ve been so emotional about their website because it is actually not just a website, it is a life change for them.

And be flexible about how you communicate with your clients. Some will be find with e-mail, others will prefer face-to-face. Some people are just face-to-face people. You can minimise client pain points by communicating with them in the way they respond best. Not the way you respond, but the way they respond best. It may not always be convenient or cost effective or time effective to meet up face-to-face all the time. We just can’t do that, so that’s when things like video Skype and Google Hangouts can maybe be a solution.

Themes. There are lots and lots of themes, hundreds of themes. It’s probably best not to overload your client with all the different theme options out there. They often don’t even care, and they don’t really know that their website is actually running on a theme. It doesn’t matter to them. They just want it to do what they need it to do and to look great.

There may be times when a client does come to you and says, “I really want to use this thing”, so I put up on the screen the DV thing, you probably all know it. It is a very popular theme. This is the one that the clients have come to us and said, “I want to use this theme because I went on a course and that’s the one they recommended”, or “My friend has a business and she set hers up on DV, and so that’s the one that I want to use.”

That’s absolutely fine as well. Plugins too. Do not overload your client and say “Which plugins do you want?” Because they’ll look at you and say, “What’s a plugin?” You probably already have all the standard plugins you install on a website automatically like Jetpack, and things like that.

So you can help your client by just taking away those pain points and helping them through that.

You can buy a batch of themes, put up on the screen elegant themes, and Template Monster. There are so many out there. And then, based on whatever project you’re doing, choose the right theme for that project. And you just take that decision away from the client and you can always talk them through it and tell them what you’re doing, and be open about it, but they don’t necessarily need to choose it. If you say to a client you haven’t really worked with before “Go away and choose a theme”, you’ll probably never hear from them again because they won’t really understand what you’ve asked them to do.

Also, if there are cost implications with buying a theme or buying a plugin, let’s say they’re running an events website and they need a specialised events plugin, you can explain that they need this and the costs involved with it from the outset.

I have also just put up here one of the themes that we use all the time, is a theme called Weaver Extreme. It is just a good theme. It has everything you need. You can make the front-end look pretty much however you want, and it is a really good versatile theme we use all the time, and most clients don’t even no they’re using that theme.

It is going back to what we said before about building a really good rapport with your clients. They’ll trust you and they’ll trust your professional judgment.

RACHAEL: Start talking about content at the very beginning. Make sure that clients don’t leave this until the last job. Have clear expectations in the beginning, and schedule stages to come later. If a deadline is looming and you haven’t received any copy, pick up the phone, but also e-mail them as well. We’ve actually had plenty of happy clients, despite a late launch, because they know it was their fault and not ours.

MEG: Also talk about blogs. Are they going to have a blog or not? If they immediately say “Oh yes, yes, I’m going to have a blog. I’m going to blog all the time.” Really? Are they really going to have a blog? If they are struggling to get their content together for their “about” page, then maybe a blog is not the best idea, or unrealistic goal. Blogs are part of the overall marketing strategic. They need to be thought out and given time. There is time commitment with blogs.

We’re really thrilled and pleased when clients take on our recommendations and suggestions, and it makes a difference to their website or business. So we’ve had clients who, you know, have got — built up a really good following from their blog, after we’ve built it for them and showed them how to do it, and how to blog and done the content, planning and the strategy, done the training with them and everything. It is fantastic. We love that. We’ve also had clients who say: yeah, yeah, we’re going to blog as we go through the whole set-up and training and everything, and we have their plan, six months or a year plan, and then the site launches with maybe one or two blog posts and then they never never blog again.

RACHAEL: These are the things the client often doesn’t even know they need. They’re invisible to them. Make them aware they have to be there, but also actually help them create it. We’ve got template versions available for all these things, just to make it easier and they can use those and they can add to them if they have time later.

Often a client will view a development site on a PC or Mac and won’t really think about the end result that actually, their site is going to be viewed on mobiles and tablets and various browsers and screen sizes. They don’t really think about the fact that it is going to take a whole heap of time to jig things around to make it work on all these different browser sizes, so help them understand that, and that that’s part of what they’re paying for. Make sure they know that it’s going to be tested, and things are going to be altered, because that’s your job, and if they launch the site and then they view it on a mobile and it is not right, you can be sure that you’re going to get the blame for that.

MEG: If you don’t help your clients, the website won’t get done. Be flexible. Offer add-on services to help them get the website done. They might be stuck on the copy, they might not really have decided on the photos or don’t have photos. Perhaps they are not sure about the social media side of it and maybe they also need training.

So you could offer these services to help get the website done. If you can’t do them yourself, then you can help them find the right people to do it for them. It is going back to what I was saying before: build your team, come to conferences like WordCamp and find other people that you can trust and that you know will be helpful to your clients to offer the whole package and just get things done. What’s better: a website launching on time and empty with an unhappy client, or a website launching late and great and one you can put on your portfolio? So be flexible and help your client.

So why bother? Why is this important? What’s the big deal? You want and need client satisfaction. You want those Google reviews and testimonials and retainer clients and bigger clients. You want more clients. Helping client with pain points and solving their problems will help to build your reputation, gain clients, and make money.

So we hope you enjoyed our talk, last screen there. And I hope you feel ready to go out there and build your five-star reputation so you can take your business to the next level. Thank you very much. [applause]. Does anybody have any questions?

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I support what you said about single point of contact, that’s absolutely, yeah, we found that to be totally vital. One of the things that tends to clause is that they go off and disappear into an internal huddle. We’ve had projects go quiet on us for months and months, and we stop getting anything back. Any tips on that? What do you tend to do in that situation? Do you bother them all the time? Do you just say, “We’ll just invoice for everything we’ve done up to this point and leave it with you”? What’s your approach?

RACHAEL: Sometimes it does drag on, and it is really hard because you don’t want to be nagging them to the point of annoyance and losing them, and so you have to judge it on the type of client. Sometimes, if we’ve got stages of work in place, there will also be payment stages, and that does help. But obviously, you just want to get the project finished and out the door as best you can, so that’s really where the deadlines along the way come in. Not just waiting for those deadlines to come round, but also babysitting them a bit, and just reminding them “Actually in a week’s time this is going to happen. So have your meetings, get what you need to get done, and then come back to us.”

It is inevitable that some projects will just drag on and be out of your hands, but unfortunately, it is more of your time, but do everything you can to remind them and push them on with things.

MEG: Yeah, I think just to add one small bit to that, you just have to be very proactive with everything you do, especially when it comes to — yeah, patient as well. And sometimes it may be out of your hands. Like an example that we have been working on a website recently where the project manager is actually a different marketing company, and they’ve outsourced the web design and development to us. So we don’t actually have contact with the end client. So we’re reliant on the other marketing company, so we’re chasing the marketing company and the marketing company is chasing the other client, so it really depends on your client relationship and all of that. I hope that answers it.

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi, when clients come so enthusiastic to you for a new website, what is it, what’s the pain point with the content usually that makes them submit it so late?

MEG: They don’t have it.

RACHAEL: Yeah. It is normally if they’ve got to write it all from scratch. We will try and say that “Okay, just provide it to us in bullet points, and you can pay us to copy edit.” I’m copyright trained, so I’m willing to do that, but sometimes they’re very precious about their own content and will only handle it themselves and that’s the stumbling block for time, because they don’t realise exactly how much time it is going to take them. So I think sometimes if you know or have an idea that the client might be going that way, set the deadline a bit longer than you originally would, just for your build, because you know there might be a hold up on their end, and then obviously it’ll get to a point where it does become their fault, as it were, because they know they should have provided it to you on time.

MEG: A lot of clients are very visual and they cannot really imagine what the content is going to be, so maybe do a little bit of research and find other websites that have similar content or content structure and say: “Look these over, and this might give you a really good starting point to devise your own content.”

RACHAEL: We’ll come to you.

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. I’ve got a 78-year old client who has just started a new business, and he has got — he had a Facebook page which I didn’t know about, and he asked me to do a website for him. I know he has been using Facebook for his other businesses, so instead of having a blog page, it’s a good idea to just put in a plugin called Facebook feed, and make that a menu item on his website, just a point, for news, and that just shows his Facebook feeds so that’s an idea if anybody wants to.

MEG: That’s a good idea. We’ve done that for a couple of clients as well. We have a client who is a pilates teacher, and she has a phobia of technology, and pretty much the only thing she can manage is the Facebook page. And when we were talking about blogs and stuff I could tell that that was just going to — she was just going to go home and go into dark room and lie down and stuff. So we suggested exactly what you said, and it works really well for her, so thank you.

FROM THE FLOOR: Hi. You’ve said you prefer to deal with an individual person in a company rather than have a whole committee bombarding you. How do you divide your side of the communication with clients up amongst yourselves and how have you developed that method of working?

RACHAEL: That’s an interesting question. We tend to have one of us as the lead project manager, and that depends what functions it requires. So really, my part of the business tends to be the marketing, PR, copywriting at search engine optimisation, whereas if it is any graphic design and web build or social media, then it is Meg. But it also can depend on where that client came from. So if it is a contact, perhaps Meg has met them networking, but this is marketing, it might make more sense. They might feel more comfortable to deal with her as the lead, but they may get communications from me as well. As long as the client knows, I feel it can work either way. It does for us, certainly.

VINEETA: Any more questions? How do clients react when you say, “We want one point of contact?” Do they like it? Because some struggle with that.

RACHAEL: It depends on the client set-up, because if it is not immediately clear, or if they have several people in the same function, it can become a bit of a bun fight for them to actually want that job or not want that job, depending on the situation. But it just has to be the case, because things have dragged on and past experience has led us to that conclusion where that is the best way forward, and if you’ve got too many people, you’re getting different answers for things, and you get passed around the houses, it is too difficult and you have to.

MEG: As long as you set out with a good plan and structure, it is never going to go smoothly, and it is always going to be different depending on the project. We work with a lot of charities and non-profits, and they make their decisions by committee, and a lot of those committee members and board member leave and new ones come in. So it is really hard to maintain that one point of contact all the time with those types of clients.

RACHAEL: Thank you.

MEG: Thank you. [applause].