 Hello. Okay, great. Awesome. Thank you, Cam, and I seriously love it that you are on brand. It's awesome So just a quick bit about pixel palace Oh, actually, no, let me just start with a bit about my talk first of all. This talk is all about perspective Like Cam just said, there's a few people in this room that have worked on fifty thousand dollar WordPress sites I'm guaranteeing there's a probably a lot that are like, holy moly That's a lot of money for a WordPress site So I'm just out of interest who thinks that fifty thousand dollars is a lot for a WordPress site Yeah, and who thinks it's not much Yeah, and who says it depends it depends. Yeah me it totally depends, right? And so today I'm going to talk about why it depends and hopefully answer the question at least from our perspective of a Small agency in the space about what goes into a fifty thousand dollar site and why it's really good value in the right circumstances So Yeah chatting about this topic to lots of people you get a lot of different opinions on it There's two parts to it One two parts to a high value website in my opinion one is the stuff you can see so design dev build functionality stuff like that But the other bits a little bit more abstract and it's about value-based pricing So I'm going to dive into both those things today in the talk But just to recap a bit about me and pixel palace So like cam said those who I don't know if anyone saw my talk last year, but I kind of Dived right into my life story a bit in terms of humanizing the brand and If you didn't see it the video is up on WordCamp TV. I'm not going to go into all this again now but Yeah, really interesting. I started in web after my glittering music career ended And I started out building business catalyst sites actually in 2007 ish And I was building sites for about 500 bucks when I started. I had a few contacts from my music industry Stuff so I was getting to work on some cool things just from home. I just had my first baby And at the time I was like talking to a friend on my couch when we first when I first started and I was like Imagine if I could earn 500 bucks a week from this this would be oh my god amazing And I think at that time I charged like some three grand for an e-commerce site and I thought I've made it that was it This was freaking unreal So it was about 2011 I found a pixel palace after that and in about 2011 we moved to being WordPress specific And now 12 years on we specialize in strategic marketing and custom WordPress in particular To talk in terms of price our custom sites range from about the 20 grand mark start point up to a hundred thousand dollars It'd be the biggest one we've done and we're a small team there's Seven as of last week. I'm currently scaling the business, but for a while there was only three Now it's been five for a bit and now we're seven so exciting times So I'm going to talk about some sites today And I am not saying that any of these sites or the sites on our portfolio or these clients paid $50,000 that is not what I'm saying But I think it's important to show some examples of some functionality and things that we built that are examples of things that go into a high-value custom site So some of our clients at pixel palace include Businesses like women's agenda, which is a large news site out of New South Wales We have done quite a few jobs for RSPCA over the years. We've got another one on the boil at the moment and Particularly their humane food division We launched travel bootcamp this year, which was a really great custom site for a bunch of travel Instagram a blogger influences that run a really fantastically large Event every year internationally to teach people how to make money from traveling and we've done quite a few travel sites So big complex African safari sites. We've done a couple things like that. So lots of content lots of pulling of stuff multilingual blah blah blah so That's the sort of examples of work that we do So what goes into a high value site? Well, obviously Design and development and I think most people think that that's what we do and it is I mean, that's the basics, right? The foundations everyone does that But this is from our agency perspective. It's much more than that So we include things like custom components is a big one in adding value I know speaking some of the talks over the last few days have really talked about some of the more custom stuff that people are doing in WordPress So that's a massive value add and one of the bits I'm going to dive into in a bit more detail and show some examples of the stuff that we've built It's UX and UI so strategic design And it's using our design experience combined with data and strategy to design a website that actually has goals in mind So it's strategic and it's not just pretty pictures Training and handover so management of the site afterwards so the back-end Architecture huge value in that and can be very time-consuming in planning As well as customer service. So Pixel Palace were really big on the customer experience of clients working with us So that's another big value add and then finally strategy and planning huge huge amount of time can go into strategy and planning on a high-value site Because there's often a lot to work with like a marketing team and a business or just lots of content and Lots of things to keep in mind To lay foundations for a successful project So this stuff is just the ticket to the game stuff, right? Like every agency should be doing this most freelancers would be doing some of this if not all of this as well It's a really good place to start obviously But I'm going to just look at this From a client perspective as well because this is part of the thing about adding Value and how you start getting up into higher value in the space of web So from a client perspective on a web project, they see all these same things It's all the same things, but they have a different meaning to clients and a different level of importance So like design they see designers, you know, it's gonna make me look cool If I'm going to speak value to clients in this space I they want to know that this is going to make them look awesome and their competitors are going to go Wow, okay. That's really cool They're awesome. Will this make me look awesome dev lots of clients even big corporates don't understand dev They don't understand the technical side of it. So their concern is this is going to work I have no idea in this space. Is it going to be fast? Is it going to be good? Are they doing it the right way? I don't know so value add there in terms of communicating that Custom components. Can I have something unique? I've got this idea for really helping clients understand What we do or finding this information easily Can I have something custom on my site that my competitors don't have? UX UI for them is will this convert? Am I going to make more sales? Is it going to work? Training and handover can we manage this in-house? I'm investing all this money and the last website we had We can't update anything without calling the web company This is a massive concern and a huge value add if you can speak to the problem of the client in terms of Yes, you'll be able to manage this in-house as long as we invest the time in making sure that we've set the back end up properly for you And lastly the strategy Making sure the investment is going to be worth it So being able to show that they're going to get ROI on it because we've laid some foundations That are based on real facts and real data and real user information There's one other big value add I think that's often overlooked by Agencies but clients in particular and that's this giving a shit so the Attention to detail in the projects and having an in-depth understanding of the client and business and the objectives and Having the whole team across that and having the whole team invested in outcomes Takes time and time equals money. This is a huge realization for me in the early days because I was What many people probably in this room will recognize freelance hell, which was I'm a massive people pleaser I want everyone to think I'm awesome and I want to deliver at a high level and I was working on clients that didn't understand that and didn't value that and weren't paying enough for me to be able to Spend the time or the energy that's involved in really giving a shit and so that was a big problem And you need budget to be able to have time to care is my point And I think it's really important for clients to understand that too It's a big part of our education with clients at pixel palaces that in terms of value. It's a hard thing to put a Dollar price on but it does add to the success of the project It adds to how fun it is to work on the project throughout with the company that you're working on And you know, it really speaks to that value-based pricing So the other bit of a high value site is this whole thing of custom versus template and I think There's a real need for some education. I think it's getting better I've seen some awesome stuff to this weekend on some of the custom stuff I know I loved Alex from frame all the stuff you're doing in ACF with you guys So that's what we're doing too and I think lots of people In the public or even in marketing don't understand what's possible in a custom WordPress this topic came from a At the time when they put the call out for speakers for this and I was trying to think of a topic to submit I had an interaction with A new marketing manager at a potential new client that we were looking to work with. They're a big a nice boutique alcohol brand And we've been in talks with them for about six months working out the project This someone in the C-suite had worked with us on another project at another company and was really really impressed and really wanted us and the new marketing manager got hired internally at their end and came on board and She rang me on her second day and said I don't want to I don't want to use you guys And I'm like, okay Well, great. That's been six months of talking to these people But okay, why because I don't want WordPress So, okay. All right. So why don't you want WordPress because I don't want to template? I don't want I don't this has to look amazing. I don't want to template I was like my god, so we spent 40 minutes of me trying to educate her She really didn't want to listen and we pulled the plug I just went I'm not working on this if you literally can come into a company this size and not understand the difference between Custom versus template and also what is possible then we are not working together So done finished So I think there's a huge amount of education. I thought this would be a good thing to talk on Especially because I know one of the word camp attendees are marketing people or maybe not high-level devs that are working in big Enterprise WordPress companies You know, you might be freelancers or you might be marketing or content or business owners And you might not realize that there's so much you can do in a custom WordPress. It's amazing So other some of the other bits that are really cool about custom stuff is being able to strategically design So we start with a blank figma file on every job. We start from scratch Which lets us design something strategic, you know, great user experience great user interface It can have the marketing message. We can do really creative stuff. We can think about mobile We can think about user journeys and all that stuff. We're not jamming things into a preset thing We can pretty much the world is our oyster The other bit of it is, you know, a custom build. There's nothing you don't need super light Really, we don't pile in a heap of plug-ins trying to make stuff happen You're not probably in a theme that's got a whole heap of stuff that you don't need So, you know more secure like we've heard over the weekend, but also just faster Another big value add in these bigger sites is the streamlined administration in a custom site Again, the stuff that Alex was talking about with the ACF That's hugely valuable. Most clients when we deliver them one of these sites to them with that built into it Their minds blown at what they can do with dragging stuff around and adding new rows and adding new pages with a page builder type functionality that they can't break In the look of their custom design that we designed for them That takes time and a lot of planning to get it well done and well executed and then execute But it's super super valuable because the time spent by Administration in-house at these big companies with marketing teams that might change over all the time It's exponentially expensive if they can't use it Properly and hand on that knowledge easily and the last bit is custom components So this is one of the bits I'm going to dive into a bit and just show you some of the stuff that we Have done over the last few years in our custom WordPress sites It's things like directories and listings Membership directories and paid membership directories complex content management using taxonomies and custom post types and ACF highly filterable content on the front end Complex gravity stuff and then again the customized admin and custom page builder functionality So some examples this Actually, this site is really quite old. It's one of our really old ones But I think it's a really great example of something that we built Where the value is greater than the sum of the parts Because this was a directory for RSPCA. It's part of their choose wisely.org.au site which is a Listing of venues that you can make you can search for a venue or restaurant cafe if you want to go somewhere that has humane food choices So has humane eggs pork chicken, whatever So it's a geo location directory Which they had before they had a clunky old one, but it worked. It was just a plug-in into a theme So we went back custom-designed the interface of that But the biggest bit that I want to talk about today was the submission of a business listing So we created a simple gravity form. It's nothing. It's nothing that crazy where people can submit all of the details of the business venue And at the bottom, it's got questions about their food choices. So they can choose, you know, yes We do the eggs. Yes, we don't do we don't use humane chicken, but we do use humane pork Submit off it goes to RSPCA. What that does in the back end is create a draft listing in the directory So it's actually creating a post in the custom post type with all of that stuff already Formatted ready to be published straight into the directory with no untouching anything And then RSPCA get the notification saying someone supplied the admin logs in they go check the listing and just check that It's all legit. They might ring them But more often than not they can see from online that it's all okay And the biggest bit is the commitment section. So this bit down the bottom here where asked the questions in the back end It lets RSPCA the biggest problem they had in admin was that they time-consumingly had to research Whether or not people tick the right boxes and it was legit and then manually set up the listing in the website Now they can just see what they answer for those questions and tick the box either there on the way or humane food all the way Which means they're completely compliant or they're only half compliant Publish and that's straight into the directory the ones that are humane food all the way get the highlighted listing because in the green and the other ones just Plane listings in order of geo location closest to wherever you searched So super simple but added a huge amount of value to the RSPCA team in terms of admin. So It's pretty cool Another example was this site that we built Mid last year. It's massive content African safari site multilingual in German and English just to add to the complexity It's basically features a lot of interactive and complex content management using taxonomies and custom post types and categories so this site has Sections for safaris accommodation listings countries regions training adventures and all of the content cross-pollinates in both languages Across all different parts of the site. So you can pull in content from everywhere Basically using the categories and taxonomies and stuff so It also features a really cool custom element one of the custom elements is heap There's too many to go into today, but this one was cool So this is on the home page and it's an interactive SVG map of Africa where you can select the Area of the region of Africa and get a quick link into some details about it So in the back end, this is an ACF row and you can just select you turn on Namibia So all the regions that are in that map are actually set up in the back end ready to go So the client could just tick it live and fill in the the top pick selections from a selector in the ACF The rest is automated publish and it's straight live to the site. So again, so simple I mean, it's not that simple a bit of JavaScript and the SVG stuff, but it's a simple idea But it's the strategy behind it and the forward thinking about how this might benefit the client and users for a long time to come. So This site also has a really cute little it's just an example of a gravity form It's an interactive inquiry form. So again, nothing that crazy, but just use a slider and gravity forms but it's a much more engaging way to capture inquiries for The business rather than just, you know, called action filling our form So, yeah, just little bits and pieces like that that are creative coffee beans But those who've seen me at word camp the last couple of times it's not work out unless I talk about coffee beans delivered This is my baby with my husband It's an e-commerce store that we started about four nearly five years ago now Over one weekend over a beer thought it was a good idea since we could build an e-commerce site that we should Yeah, it's turned out okay, but it's now its own beast. It's its own company. It has five staff My husband works it full-time. We have an espresso bar a distribution center and it's probably one of the top online retail artisan coffee sites on in Australia So yeah, it went well, but yeah, yeah That's another story. But anyway This is a great example of something custom as well. So on this site We found that people were having trouble deciding on what coffee they should buy There's lots of choices and they weren't sure so we came up with this idea for this interactive quiz Which is basically just using a gravity form again And some custom graphics and obviously some front-end stuff, but it lets people go through and select Their preferences about what machine you use stuff like that Personality types just a kind of cute one bring my answer Gives you a little different thing every time you get this page and then it pops out basically a Coffee personality. So they're all different depending on what you picked Which is shareable on social media and they're really really funny But these are three products Selected specifically like a line to what you selected in that quiz. So it's real If you'd selected milk, then ill caramel is a fantastic Blend for you and also you said you drank more than two one or two a day So you're probably gonna need a kilo and you need whole beans because you said you had a grinder So the product selection simple, right gravity forms custom post type WooCommerce and a whole lot of Really complex like matrix of if they select this is this is it lands here But nothing too crazy in terms of functionality the value was in the thinking and the strategy on it And it was super valuable because we found that once we launched this about it was about six months after we launched the site we implemented this and If people go through the quiz that the conversion rate was 200 times what it was without the quiz So it also on the side because it's a gravity form the data gets stored in the gravity form in the back end So although this doesn't look like a form and you're not submitting anything you actually are So we have collected a great amount of really useful user data on our customers If they're logged in to the site into the WooCommerce as well It stores against their customer records so we can see what machine they have and stuff like that if they've done the quiz So we use that data for marketing directly to them about Things specific to them So that's custom components. I could talk all day on custom components. I actually really love it It's one of the bits. I love about what we do But the other big big important bit here in terms of value is strategy It's really scary jumping into something of high value and not feeling like there's a strategy and I've seen that Before we started doing strategic marketing We'd often see big companies come to us and they need a website and they have budget and stuff But you'd start digging and realize they actually had no plan for the web no digital plan They might have had a marketing plan, but no actual real plan so Having a plan a good marketing strategy, but also a plan for the website is absolutely crucial in making things work small or big But if you're investing this much money when you're up in this level of thing then a plan is absolutely Vital so it's things like having a marketing plan and a brand strategy, you know the obvious stuff Understanding your market and your target market and how to speak to them Yeah, it's easy to assume that you their clients know why they want a website, but really more often Just frightening The other bit is you know UX UI taking the strategy and turning it into a really good design that works so We also find here a really good value adders Anything we can do to get the client really focused on the user at this point So that's things like user goals and journey mapping content canvases aligned with their business goals and all that sort of stuff Is part of what we wrap into a package on a higher value site like that because we don't want to work on anything That's not going to work It doesn't feel good Architecture is the other thing so Along with planning. It's about looking at audience research So looking at real data if they've got an existing site will look at you know How's that performing? What are the top pages? Where are people going? Where are they dropping off all that sort of stuff? And use that to plan the new one It's really great to show that to clients because it adds massive value when you're starting to talk about real data And not just abstract assumptions on things Then also it's about considering how WordPress is going to handle the project So we do spend a lot of time and this is pre-build pre-design pre-content pre-final content a lot of the times a lot of time planning and the structure and Laying the groundwork and foundations for things like the custom post types and taxonomies and how things are going to feed into How things are going to pull across all different parts of the site And also the back-end architecture. How are we going to build this so people can manage it? What's going to be the best way to future pre-fit for them so that they get a really good clear run at this Themselves without having to come back and get help So the other big piece here is understanding value and selling on value It's a tough one in this space because you do get people that just go I want to know how long it's going to take you and I only want to pay you that and That's not right. That's not right. There's so much. This is such a complex part of this whole thing I'm really fascinated by it actually There's a few things that go into this though that make this whole thing more than a website Relationships matter when you're embarking on a massive high-value site like this It's a bit of time and in a team our size like when we were three people and we were doing sites this size It's a massive investment. We are all in that whole team is all in and all over this whole thing so the relationship with the client is so important to having it work and feel good and maintain the momentum and Feel good about it and anyone in the agency will know how quickly even freelancers everyone that works with clients will know How quickly a client's attitude or their communication style or the relationship can just put a big downer on the whole thing and make You not want to work on it anymore. I have this analogy that everyone laughs at But I think it's a good one that embarking on a decent-sized web project with an agency is like choosing a baby daddy because basically you're You're choosing to have a child together that you're going to raise for some amount of time together Whether it's just getting that thing born or if it's raising it to go off to college and be successful and make lots of money And support you into your old age and I think You need to choose it carefully like choosing based on whether you feel a synergy with this thing and you trust the agency And you trust the people and in vice versa I'm so picky about the clients we work with because I have a small team to protect the energy of and I want it to Always I want Mondays to feel great that pixel palace. So the relationship matters communication Major factor why a lot of projects fail And I think again that feeds back into the relationships, but it adds to value if an agency communicates really well That is valuable and something that probably doesn't get talked about enough in terms of shopping around and trying to shop on price Price won't matter when you're not getting an answer from people or you feel like you're just not getting what you need It's the worst Systems and processes so you need systems and processes if you're working on big sites that things stay on track and on budget and avoid Scope Crete Things will fall over if you don't have processes in place having process and systems takes time and budget and experience So again, it's adding to the value Price versus cost Yeah, so this is this is a great one because people shop on price on websites for some crazy reason I just Can I I don't know I don't understand it's kind of like shopping on price on a car I get it if all you can afford is a $500 car because that's all you can afford And you need a car and I think fit for purpose and all that stuff But what you buy for $500 is not what you buy for $10,000 or $50,000 and the people understand that in that analogy But they don't seem to understand it in web So it's about taking a client from a low expectation of budget because they don't understand all this stuff that I'm talking about and Moving them through that education to understand that sometimes the cost of a website is invisible like sometimes you can't tell how much this thing is costing you in lost opportunity or time wasted or not converting and You know paying a couple of grand To get it designed and built is nothing compared to what you're losing from not having done all this other stuff in the background. So It's a tough one and then charging for value rather than time So, you know if you employ an agency like pixel palace or some of the other sort of agencies in the space you're employing experience and speed and Expertise and you're you're you're buying on outcomes. You're not buying on where it's going to take us 40 hours to do that You know, it's our experiences come from years and years and years of doing this stuff over and over and seeing it all So we can be quick and awesome And we know how to quickly jump in and do something and we have things in place to be able to roll stuff out really quickly That's valuable. It's that thing of you know, you go the dentist and he tells you it's gonna be $500 to pull that tooth out And it's hurting you you don't argue with him and say it's only gonna take you 10 seconds to pull that tooth out I'm only gonna pay you for the 10 seconds. No, you're paying for the whole thing. It's like value-based value-based rather than time based And then just coming back to the thing of giving a shit is valuable giving a shit is valuable That's the bit for me and I think it's just so intangible, but it's it getting a team Or a freelancer who cares is worth paying for And if you think it's expensive to hire a professional wait until you hire an amateur now It's so tough in this space because I do believe if you pay peanuts you generally get monkeys You might luck it out and get something really awesome and but that poor developer or freelancer is probably dying Conversely I'm all about not selling to clients who shouldn't spend big money for something. I'm definitely Massive fit for purpose is my thing all about fit for purpose So there's a range of options out there in this space. You can get a site for $500 You can get a site for $100,000. They're both websites And everything is okay The lower end of things is okay too if that's what you can afford and that's all you can do then that's okay But it's about understanding that what you get for that is less experience less care less time less speed less technically sound That's okay as long as you're aware It's like the car thing if you can only afford the $500 car You know you're not getting something terribly safe or long-lasting, but you're okay because you understand We've probably all seen examples of this like the client that spent 800 dollars on a website And then is immediately redoing it again because they realized that was just so stupid And it doesn't even work properly and they may as well gone to the pub with that 800 dollars And they want to at that point All clients who cut out the two interesting bits of functionality that we propose on a website to make it different and actually Convert for them because of budget, but then they just have like a boring our site that they could have just had a template and You know they look like everyone else and they had a chance to really get ahead Or clients conversely who pay too much we had one client come to us a couple years ago that had spent $40,000 on a invado template and Yeah, and so that terrifies me and it's just awful so it's about fit for purpose So basically that's kind of it the takeaways from today that I would like you to take from my talk if anything There's five things one there needs to be a plan I think there's to be a plan regardless of budget, but the more time the more budget you have the more time you have The better plan you can have Wordpress can be greater than the sum of its parts. I'm yet to see something. We can't do with a custom WordPress like you can do some cool shit So I love WordPress for that. And if anyone tries to tell me otherwise next The architecture of the admin and the back end adds a huge amount of value And this is something people don't talk about enough But it really should be if you're a marketing manager and you're getting quotes on websites like talking about what how the back-end architecture is going to be set up is Really really important Relationships matter relationships for me and communication is the biggest thing in my business It's the reason why pixel palace always has done well because I'm a communicator. I'm a people person might not be the best designer Definitely not developer But I understand people and I know how to communicate well So I manage relationships well and that is of massive I think you could talk to anyone that pixel palace has worked with in the last ten years And that would be the number one thing they say at the end of a project at the beginning I was scared of spending the money This was what you were three times more expensive than some of the other quotes I got for ten times more expensive But oh my god in a heartbeat do it again I wish I I wish I knew that at the beginning and so and I have this thing too I'm always like if you knew what I know you'd be fine with you'd be like shut up and take my money So relationships and communication is everything in that space and then value is not all about the time it takes like the dentist So that's a really important thing. I think for everyone freelancers as well as Potential clients or if you're in the market for a website understanding that the value is not about the time it takes That's it. Got time for questions We've got time for a few questions, I believe So if you could come down the front, we will have some microphones and yeah, thanks again, Jen. That was awesome talk Thank you so much. I love that. I love the slides are awesome in your stories You talk about communicating value to your clients. What's the best way to do that? So do you tell them horror stories about that $40,000 website built on a template or data? How do you communicate the value that you bring I think Onboarding of client like the initial first few conversations with clients are super important and I think also in that space The energy that you come at relate like again, I'm I'm naturally really good with people So I naturally do this thing where you can see I'm being authentic when I talk to you about What we do and what the value is in that and I believe that so people feel it I think it's really hard to have that conversation if you don't believe the value yourself So that's probably one thing is really getting clear within yourself if you're having these conversations with people like That you value it and that you're not going on It's not really worth it because a minute you feel like that then they're gonna feel that too But yeah, like it's it depends on the situation depends on the client Sometimes it's great to say if they've got a really low budget expectation because someone else has quoted You know 10 grand and we're saying this is 40 and literally genuinely if we're saying it's that then I'm telling you that it Needs to be that like this isn't so I think yeah, I think it's such a thing I think it's confidently believing that it's worth that and understanding the value and then working out a way to clearly communicate that in the right Every client has a different fear. I guess that early bit. Yeah. Yeah, so Understanding their problem and trying to help them solve it This is probably yeah Thank you. It was a great great talk for these feature-rich sites who owns the IP Of those features you or the client. Um, I they they own What we did for them That's not to say that we can't go and build Something with a similar setup for someone else We never ever have copied Exactly from one to another Because all of our sites are custom like in any way anyway if you look through our portfolio See, they're all completely different. There's not one that looks like. Oh, yeah, they've kind of gone Oh, yeah, that's the same thing totally different So, yeah, I mean those clients own their thing. Yeah, they can do what they want with that There's no restriction on us as far as I'm aware or concerned that we can't go and do the same sort of build because they're all iterations Of the same thing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so then following follow on question from that if someone wanted You know another agency wanted to come along and say all that choose wisely functionality. Love it. Can I buy it? They think you sell it nothing. Well, there's nothing in that So that's the beauty of that right and like it's literally a gravity form and a custom post type that creates the draft post We didn't write that that's like so I think there's a part of this too. That's like we Some of that functionality is built using premium plugins We try not to use plugins Unnecessarily, but some of that big the heavy lifting is done by things like Well, I see F obviously but GMI WordPress and facet WP and those sort of things like there's no need to reinvent the wheel on it So all of that stuff is basically strategic use of plugins together and some of the native WordPress stuff like custom post types and taxonomies and things like that If there's nothing proprietary in it We haven't done anything that we did that we couldn't do with a plug-in almost and some clever stuff So so yeah, um and there's a different question. Um communicating with your clients Uh, do you just do that over email and phone or do you insist on a certain way to interact? That's a good one. Um email is horrible. I think things go pear shaped on email so damn quickly. It's not funny Um, so I think a lot of clients are happy to rage on an email as well But they don't tend to rage when you pick up the phone And I feel like a lot of creatives in particular are really scared of that phone call But I mentor a lot of other designers and Sort of startups and the creative thing and I'm always saying to them get comfy with these conversations Get comfy with uncomfortable conversations Because what I found over 10 years of doing this is that clients love me because I have boundaries and I say no That's a really great idea But no, we're not doing that because it's out of scope and it'll take us another three days to do and but we can do it I can quote on it blah blah blah, but that's a phone call not an email They get an email on that and they're like pissed off So I am definitely a phone call girl or a meeting We have found two presenting Designs the first time to clients in particular where there's multiple stakeholders In person or at least on a zoom so I can watch them because I watch their face and I know and I can I I've got a spidey sense that my team will tell you it's hilarious. I'll predict I can tell you what their feedback is going to be before they send it and every time it's like Yeah, so yeah, but being there and presenting in person lets you Talk them through the stuff that it's so easy to make assumptions that people know everything that we know And you know, you've been working on a design a complex design for a big corporate site for ages And you just send that off to them and we've got all these assumptions because we've been looking at it Yeah, like that's going to be sticky So when they scroll it's going to stay there and then you send them the thing and you send some notes I don't read that those sort of things and they're like, well, is there a big blah blah blah blah? And then they're upset already whereas you go and present that you talk them through this awesome thing and they're like This is amazing. So again, it's the giving a shit part. It's that bit of Yes, it's easier to fire off a PDF or send them a link to the figment of comment on or whatever it is that you do Is your process But there's huge value in stopping and taking time to actually cuddle them and say let's talk this through I want to show you my enthusiasm and what we thought and the thinking behind it and that we had strategy And this is why we did this and imagine when it does this and you get sign off first pop We get sign off first pop on most things that we send big things because we go and do that So great. All right. Thank you for your interest Thanks again, Jen. That was a great talk. I'm sure we're all going to Ask everyone to The person next to you to give you $50,000 to build the more website It's got to be worth it. It's got to be worth it. Is there another question? Are we done? Yeah, I was just wondering how far do you get through scoping before you give the quote of this will be $50,000. Yeah. Yeah. So these big sites definitely often have a paid scoping So we'll do a workshop where we if they can't give us a very detailed brief So one big one that we're working on currently The marketing girl at that place is amazing and detailed and has the most amazing like Everything done brief amazing content done all ready to go Very easy for us to just go bang. That's how much that is but more often than not these big corporates in particular Have no idea. So we say we'll go and spend a day or two days or whatever it is working with your marketing team Or working whoever it is there a thing to come up with The plan and from that plan they'll come out of it with an architecture for the site perhaps and a contents Like here's the pages and the architecture. Here's a content canvas that you can go and start thinking about content on Do you need help with content? Do you need a marketing plan? Do you need, you know, so From that if they if they have no idea and we can't see clearly what the scope is because we do fixed price We're not doing You know, it's it's this is the cost of this site to this scope If we can't see that clearly then I won't provide a a quote and they have to do that. Otherwise, we're Out. Yeah Sweet. Well, thanks again, Jen. Thanks. Um, yeah, thanks for your talk and for your awesome well-coloured slides