 May I present Dinelle Dawes. Dinelle is the owner of Berry Interesting Productions, a WordPress agency and No Kill Website, a website rescue shelter for re-homing and re-homing program. She has 15 years, more than 15 years, of experience wrangling clients that eat expensive shoes, bark incessantly at squirrels, and anger pee on the carpet. She has helped plan and volunteered with word camps in Nashville and Denver since 2012. She was lead organizer for WordCamp Nashville 2016 and headed the team responsible for bringing WCUS to Nashville for 2017 and 18. She is currently located in Denver, Colorado. And take it away. Indeed I am. I'm going to turn this microphone on. Hi, everyone. I don't know who Kitty Lusby is, but we were chatting on Twitter. And I feel like after the last talk, we should all just yell, woo! Really loud. Is everybody ready? Woo! Big fan of WooCommerce. I'm working on some WooCommerce projects right now, actually. So I'm Danelle. And I own very interesting productions, which is a web development agency. And I am also the mastermind behind No Kill websites, which is something a little bit new that I'm working on. I'm really excited to talk about my ideas about that here today. And hopefully you will find those helpful as well. No Kill websites is a No Kill shelter for abandoned abuse or lost website owners who are looking for help making smart, long-term decisions. So we're going to be getting a lot of dog and cat photos and gifts here. So I hope you're as excited about that as I am, because I probably spent half of the time working on this just looking at different dog memes. So I'm originally from Nashville, but I live in Denver now. And I'm so excited that I was close enough to be able to drive down and be here with you guys today. And very happy to not live in Nashville anymore. It is great to visit. I do not move there. So the inspiration for No Kill websites was my experience as a freelance WordPress website builder. And I call myself a website builder, because I really don't think that I'm a developer. A lot of people will say that they're a developer, and then they can't write PHP. And you're like, but wait, there is a disconnect here. And so we'll talk a little bit about how that word developer has gotten twisted and how you can work your way through figuring out whether the person that you want to work with is actually a developer, if they're more like me, who is amazing at the dashboard, but the minute that I get onto that server and start looking at PHP files, I'm like, I'm done here. I really need help. So really the inspiration for this was my pit bull Annie. Cece is a mutt. And we've had her since she was a puppy. Like we got her at like eight or 12 weeks. And she has really turned out to be a good dog, despite me. I did not know what I was doing with her. Annie actually has helped me train Cece more than I have trained Cece. And she came to me accidentally. We fully intended to foster her through her space surgery. And then Cece fell in love with her. And so we have adopted her. And now it is impossible to rent a department. She's incredible. She came to us like fully health broken. We're like, you're trained. We don't have to do any work for you. It was amazing. And these two, I work from home like 95% of the time. These two are always with me. They really are like my coworkers. And really all they do all day is kind of stare out the window. And I assume that they are wondering whether they are the good dog or the bad dog. And honestly, sometimes they are both. It just depends. And so who is this talk for today? It really is aimed at people who are at your level. It's aimed at people who are excited about working in WordPress themselves and exciting about doing things themselves. But you get to a point where you reach a wall. Where if you have to make a change, like somebody was asking a question about WooCommerce earlier about where do you change that text. And the answer was you're going to have to go in and out a hook or a filter or some nonsense. And it's like, OK, that's where I stop. That's where I just don't want to proceed past that point. And so I have spent a lot of time reaching out for help to people who are more skilled than I am at development. And let me tell you, these people are skilled at development, but they are not always skilled at actually speaking in normal language. And as I learned more about development and learned how to do more things myself, I got better at talking to people who are actually true coders and developers. And what I saw more and more is that people would come to me, people who had really kind of been abandoned and abused as website owners. And I think that the reason for that abuse is just a matter of communication and not really understanding the relationship. So before we dive into talking about having a healthy relationship with your developer, I want to acknowledge that there are plenty of things that you don't need a developer for. I constantly shame my dogs because they do nothing. They do not bring any income. They don't work. They mostly nap all day. And they generally are just princesses. But they make my life infinitely better. They lower my blood pressure. They make me smile. They keep me safe when my husband is gone and I am home alone. And they just generally enhance my life. And I feel that way a lot about developers, that there are ways to figure this out that you don't need a developer, but it is faster. It is more efficient if you can have a healthy relationship with your developer. So assuming that you do need a developer, that's what we're going to talk about today. So this is my good dog. Linda was incredible. Linda, she was my first client, which is beyond me messing around with WordPress myself. And I'm absolutely smitten with her still. I have to confess something to you guys. I don't want to be a developer, even though I keep learning how to develop things. Like right now I'm learning how to build custom post types. I don't want to be the developer. I am better when I am trying to figure out what the problem is, as opposed to how to solve that problem. And that tends to be the first thing that you run into when there is a disconnect between developer and client or developer and builder. That if you don't identify what the actual problem is and you can't articulate what you went out of your website first, it's really hard for the developer to give you that. So to give you a little story about Linda, the first WordPress website that I built back in 2009, it was an e-commerce website because why not just dive right in? And Linda makes soap out of her garage, like in a separate garage in the back of her house outside of Nashville. And she had 42 products that we needed to move off of a proprietary, like the speaker before was, I don't know why I keep wanting to call him Ryan. His name is Dustin. Like he was talking about the sort of Shopify, that proprietary space. She was on a proprietary space that had been built by an individual developer. And she had had a relationship with him for a while, but she couldn't change anything. She couldn't even change the phone number on the bottom of her site, and she was super frustrated. And then the developer kind of outgrew her and outgrew that relationship, and so she couldn't even get him to call her back. So when she came to me, what she ended up staying with me for was my ability to call her back, my ability to listen, and my ability to talk to her in a way that she could actually understand. And by the way, if you guys need any handmade soap, it's called Alchemy of Soul. She's incredible. I still have it shipped to me out in Denver, even though I don't live in Nashville anymore. So I was really excited to build this website for her. She was giving me a chance, and I told her that I would build this site for $300. And then that I would build the e-commerce portion of it for $500. So for $800 total, we built her an e-commerce website. She was incredibly patient with me, but I ended up spending about, I want to say, 200 hours on that, so you can do the math on exactly what I made on that first website that I built. And she was, I got so lucky with her. I mean, she was very patient with me, but she wasn't a pushover either. Part of why it took that many hours is because she was committed to getting what she wanted. And so a lot of it was her telling me exactly what she wanted out of that site and me turning around and figuring out how to give that to her, even though I didn't know how. And once we got that website built, it was incredibly easy to maintain. This was kind of before we really had to worry about WordPress security. And she continued to spend money with me on a regular basis every month for about five years. She relied on me for not very much. I mean, 50 bucks a month at that point was two hours a month for me. She would call me, she'd ask me for advice, is it okay if I do this? And we had a really fantastic relationship until, I want to say, probably 2013. And that is when her son graduated college and took the website over. So I was able to hand over that WordPress website to him, still running after all of those years and handed off to him and they took it all in house. So what I learned from that experience is really that the way to communicate between Linda and I was, it was not as easy with other clients. Her site wasn't the last site that I built. I spent probably eight years building WordPress websites. I built a couple last week and I do not think that I developed them. I built them. I installed WordPress. We use WP Engine now. So all that I had to do is click install WordPress. I could go install Divi or any number of pre-built themes and turn around and build it all myself in this whizzy, wig way, not even having to code anything. I already told you guys about how long it took me to build that site. Anyway, the experience of building that site and the experience of building sites for me still is that it is a very frustrating process and I've found that I kind of have this dual personality. I am on and I'm excited about helping clients when I'm talking to clients and then when I sit down in front of that screen and start to organize my thoughts about where information needs to go and how this site is gonna be put together, I turn into a jerk. My dogs and my husband can testify that I am not a very nice person when I'm sitting at that computer and doing all of that sort of cerebral stuff and not thinking about communicating with other people. So I still push myself to do things like that. That's why I'm learning how to build custom post types and it's a terrible custom post type, trust me. And the plugin that I built a couple of years ago is like seriously terrible. But it was a really valuable process because it taught me exactly what the developer has to do in order to give me what I want. So now I can turn around and go to my developer, Cindy and I can be like, Cindy, here is exactly what I need XYZ and then I don't have to touch the code and being able to communicate that to her in a way that she can hear it makes life so much easier. She is happy, she can go and do what she loves to do which really is building these really fantastic things. And I can think about what I want built and she doesn't have to think about what needs to be built. She doesn't have to think about if the visuals are right. I am able to give that all to her. So by dividing up that labor, we're actually making everybody's lives easier. Everybody's getting to do what they want to do. And so while I love being able to do things on my own I'm very, very thankful that I have got the relationships with the developers that I do have. So knowing what I know about the development process that it's really isolating that on any given day I am focused on a very discreet set of tasks that somebody has set before me. Somebody has told me what they want and I'm going to give it to them. You know, these tasks can be repetitive. Some of these tasks require research. You know, Linda and I went back and forth a lot about how she didn't want to pay for my learning curve. And I'm like, that's okay, but I'm at $25 an hour. So maybe you are paying for my learning curve a little bit. And also that is kind of a fool's errand. If somebody says that to you, then you need to step back and think about what they're asking because the experience of being a developer is always about learning. There's no end to the developer learning curve. You are constantly learning new things. You are cataloging snippets of code that you found that that way you don't have to go back and recreate the wheel or dig through Google for another 15 minutes. So you're building your own personal library. It really is especially working with a code base like WordPress where it has this huge and supportive community around it. Part of what you're doing as a developer is making connections with other people so that you have those resources when you need to build something as well. But what it looks like in reality is me sitting at my computer being super grumpy. I forget to go to the bathroom sometimes. And then I look up three hours later and I'm like, I probably should get up and take a walk. Maybe take the dogs out to the bathroom. So it becomes this experience. It's almost like out of body experience where you're so focused on something. So the reason that I tell you all of that is because I want you to understand what the experience of being a developer day in and day out is like so that you can be empathetic when you're asking them to do something and when you're thinking about what it is that you're telling them to do or asking them to do. If you can be more empathetic about what their experience is like, you're going to get a better website. Absolutely, because that developer is going to be happy. And it really is all about keeping the developer happy. With very interesting productions, my day to day, that is my goal constantly is to keep Cindy happy, keep her calm and make sure that she is able to do her work in an environment that is positive for her. And part of that is making sure that I'm the one who's having conversations with the client. If I, half the time if I turned loose my clients on Cindy, she would just kind of shut down. She wouldn't be interested in continuing to do something. So if you leave here with nothing else today, what I want you to leave here with is a commitment to being empathetic for a developer or an agency or anybody that you're partnering with. Because the more that you can be empathetic and try to come at it from their perspective, the better you're going to be at getting what you want for your website. So this is really the experience that I've had as a developer and then also as a site owner because I am both now. Now that I have this luxury of being able to outsource the bulk of my development to my developer, I have started to take on this role of site owner. You know, I don't, I have these big ideas that I want to implement and I really do not want to think about the problem itself. I just want to identify what I want and then ask my developer to give it to me. So an awareness of the differences of what the developer's day is like versus what your day is like as the site owner is very helpful. I have so many clients come to me and when they first come to me, they know that they want a website, but that's it. And meanwhile, all that that developer is thinking about all day, every day is very specific items that they are going to be asked to build on this website. And so throwing at a developer, I need a website, that's all I've got, can really paralyze the developer. Being as specific as possible is going to help you get exactly what you want out of that developer out of that development partner, if it's an agency, a designer, what have you. And so being very specific about what you need is super helpful. If I had a client who came to me and had a list of everything that they wanted, including like the pages and the sections that they already wanted out of their site, we have already done, they've already done a massive amount of work almost on my behalf as the account manager, as the project manager. So as you are going to this development partner and asking for them to make your life easier, essentially, so that you don't have to learn how to build custom post types and you don't have to learn how to go into the PHP file and find that piece of text that you want to remove. You have to think about the technical end of things, but the developer can't be a mind reader. And over and over, what I have found with developers is that they're really terrible at intuiting what it is that you want. When I wear the developer hat, I am terrible at being able to intuit what people want because as I get super cerebral and sucked in to my screen, I start to lose all of my empathy. So if you can be really specific with them about what it is that you want and about what you're trying to accomplish, they're gonna be able to do a better job for you. And so even when you do go to them and you tell them what you want, you run into a problem of really the fact that you guys are speaking two different languages. And this particular point is extremely relevant for me right now because I am in the middle of a website build for a client who needs an online catalog. We're using WooCommerce, but we're not gonna sell anything. And the biggest problem between us comes down to the fact that we're using different vocabulary terms. He is talking about a product and when he is talking about a product, he uses the product number or the part number. And when I'm talking about it, I'm like a product post. He's like, what the hell is a product post? I don't know what you're talking about. So if you can establish a vocabulary where you're both talking, using the same terms, it can make life a lot easier so that you don't have to go back and forth. And when someone says, yes, the product post, the client doesn't have to come back and say, oh, but do you mean the product number or did you mean the series or whatever? So establishing that common vocabulary can be really helpful. And the developer spends all day thinking about things like CSS or DNS or MX records and all the way down into the PHP code itself. Meanwhile, you're over here trying to describe what it is that you want with a vocabulary that is coming from what you have envisioned and not from an expertise about the very specific parts of building a website. So what we're gonna talk about next is how to overcome that difference in vocabulary and the difference in communication. So whether you are looking to have a direct relationship with your designer or developer or you're hiring an agency where the team includes a developer, your best approach is to think about how to be a good dog. Like think about what it is that they are wanting from you. I mean, I watch Annie and CeCe all the time looking at me trying to figure out what it is that I want from them. And I swear if I could just like have five minutes alone with each of them where they would understand me, it would be like seriously, CeCe, why are you eating your poop? Can you explain this to me so that we can fix this for you? There's a completely different language there. I can't bark at her, I can't whine at her. We're talking two different languages, but I found more and more that if I watch what it is that she and Annie are doing and I watch the way that they behave, I can start to understand what they're telling me even though they're not speaking the same language. And so part of this, sometimes I feel like this. Sometimes I genuinely feel like I'm just gonna have to do this myself. And that is really where a lot of my drive to still learn about development comes from is this desire to do things myself. But what I've found over and over is that as I learn how to do things myself, it just proves to me again that I don't actually want to do that. I really do want somebody on the leash. When we bring a new client on, or when you bring a new dog into your home, it takes a while to kind of sense what's going on with each of you. Is get down the same as off? Is dinner the same as food? So since we are humans and we have opposable thumbs and we can access things like Google and email, we can kind of try to get out ahead of these communication barriers because we can use Google, we can ask friends, we can come to events like this. And so as a client who is seeking development services or who is seeking a relationship with somebody who can help take that, your website to the next level, the first thing that I would recommend is getting a working vocabulary going where you do understand when somebody asks you about MX records or when somebody says, I need to know the domain that we're associating this website versus I need to know what the URL is. Like they are indeed two distinct things. And when I ask a client for a URL and then they send me back like clientwebsite.com, I'm like, no, no, no, like we're literally which page on the website? They're like, oh, the contact page. Okay, how am I going to get to the contact page in your website? I can go over to your website and I can search for your contact page, but it would have been way more helpful if the client had said, hey, here's the URL of this page where it's completely broken. So get over there and fix it. So knowing these sorts of vocabulary terms are gonna help you to be able to communicate with them better. And I would advise you to, before you even go looking for a development partner, to ask yourself some questions about what it is that you want out of your website and what it is you want out of the relationship with the developer. Do I want a dog that is gonna go on hikes with me and will encourage me to take longer walks? Do I need a dog with high energy or do I need a dog with low energy who's literally gonna do nothing but Netflix and chill? Sometimes I think that maybe CC and Annie have too much energy for me because my ratio of hiking to Netflix and chill is a little bit different than theirs. But you really need to ask yourself, what do you like? What do you want? What is your budget? And bless you, if you can establish a budget before you ever approach a developer, they are going to love you forever. I think I have had two clients in the past five years who have actually known what their budget was when they came to me. There is a lot of what should it cost and I don't wanna spend too much. Look at what's your highest tolerance for what you can spend. Look at what you're expecting to spend. Even if you don't have very much knowledge about what it should cost, you still kind of have a gut feeling of like, I really only wanna spend $2,500 on this. Can we get away with it? Because if you can come to the developer or your developer partner with a budget range, they're gonna give you a different set of solutions than they might. They came to them and said, we've got $10,000 to burn, let's customize this. Not to say that they're gonna build you something that's less quality, it's just there's a fast way to do this that does indeed make some sacrifices and then there is the way to do it that's all the bells and whistles and all the fun stuff and they can take as long as they want to build it. Another question to ask yourself is what is your actual launch deadline? I have a lot of clients that come to me that are like as soon as possible and then there are other clients that come to me that say it really doesn't matter, I just want this website built. It's really hard for me to give a client what they want if I don't have an idea of what they're, I mean even if it is a pure wish list of like this is just my fantasy of what my website would look like, that's a better place to start than I just need a website. The other thing to consider as you are thinking about the things that you need to communicate to your developer is how responsive can you be and how much of a part of the process of the build can you be, do you have two hours a week or are you available for whenever they call because this needs to happen right away? Your responsibility to the developer is gonna dictate how long this project takes in most cases. So the more that you can know yourself, the better off you're gonna be to set those expectations from the beginning so that the developer kind of knows what's going on and if you can take six months to build this website then that's great, that means the developer could maybe start the development more or could start it earlier, other things could happen concurrently so it's really helpful to be able to say that upfront. And another one that I've been thinking about lately is what do you expect your website's lifespan to be? A lot of people don't think about that, they think I'm gonna build a website and I have dumped $15,000 into this website and I'm never gonna have to spend that money again. Absolutely not, you need to think about how long you need this website to be around whether it's gonna be three years, whether it is gonna be 40 years. I have been saying lately that most of my websites have a lifespan of about three to five years and whether we expect that to be the case or not, you get three to five years down the road, technology has changed so much, the trends of website aesthetics and website user experience have changed. So if you think about how long you need that website to be around, it can give you an idea of what that relationship with the developer is gonna look like long term. So part of what I recommend to people when they are looking for someone to help them with development is to ask questions that maybe aren't necessarily relevant to your website but are relevant to the kind of developer that you are engaging, whether they're a builder like me or they're a developer who's doing completely custom code or they're somewhere in between or maybe they're a graphic designer that has a development partner. You wanna start asking these questions so that your website can be as healthy as possible for as long as possible. When Annie first came to us, she didn't come inside our house, she's in our front yard. I literally had kind of like picked her up out of traffic and after assessing the situation and realizing what was going on, she ended up coming back into our fenced in yard and I didn't wanna let her in the house because I had no idea if she had fleas, if she had heartworms, if she had something that she was gonna give CC, had no idea. So the first thing that I did before I ever even let her into the house at all was I took her to the vet. And they asked the usual questions around the usual tests, but what they didn't tell me and what I didn't know to ask is that apparently with dogs, if you have a dog whose heartworm status is unknown, you need to test them every six months and instead of once a year. Well, I'd had a dog since they were a puppy and it didn't, that had just never come up. I didn't understand the way that the heartworm test works and because it takes at least six months for once a dog is infected to actually be identified as having heartworms, we took Annie in a year later for her next test and she was tested heartworm positive. If I had done my independent research and actually looked into what heartworm testing involved, it would've, it was right there. Like I Googled it the other day. It's like literally right there in the ASPCA website. So I just had in my head that this is how it was and then later on down the road, it's like, oh, hey, big surprise. Now you get to do heartworm treatment. So when you're looking for a development partner, there are some questions that you're not gonna know to ask, but if you start asking these questions that I'm gonna talk about here, it's gonna help you to identify whether or not this developer actually is healthy and it's somebody that you wanna start a relationship with. The first thing you should just ask for references and not just for the references directly. Like yes, I do wanna hear who's gonna say good things about them. I wanna hear about those positive experiences and so you do wanna contact references that they provide but it really is also worth it to go check their online portfolio. Click through to the live site links whenever you can. See what kind of work they're doing. See if you even vibe. Like I'm really big on vibe. I moved to Denver, Colorado, I wonder why. I really am very much about the interpersonal relationship and whether we wanna work together. If we wanna hang out, do we wanna hang out? Awesome, then let's talk about working together. You should also check their social media feeds. That'll give you more information about who they are as a person but it'll also kinda give you some red flags that there are conversations with other clients. I have clients who comment on the very interesting posts that I put up all the time and it's generally this one guy who is a baker and he bakes gluten-free stuff and he's very interactive with me. And so seeing the way that a developer interacts with those clients via social media can give you an idea of what the relationship would be like between the two of you. You might even wanna ask your developer for an unflattering reference. I have several of those. I have a very unhappy client right now who against my advice did not sign up for our support plan and didn't do anything to the site for six months and now it's starting to break because nothing's updated and boy is he angry. And honestly I would want you to know that that interaction happened. I would want you to know why he's unhappy and how that relationship went. So if the developer can give you an answer like what is your most recent unhappy client look like and they can actually tell you, then that gives you an idea of what their actual life is like as opposed to my resume and my beautiful Instagram feed where I'm happy all of the time, find out from them what their unhappy clients look like. And we're all here at WordCamp today. Start checking with the WordPress community. If your developer is worth their salt, they're in some way involved in the WordPress community. It may not be that way in other development communities but I have found that over and over the more quality developers are the ones who are doing things to give back to WordPress core. They're building plugins that are maintained out on the repository. They are coming to WordCamps or they're coming to meetups. You know, find out what kind of relationships they have with other developers and agencies. It's been really weird for me to be in Denver because in Denver it doesn't seem to be the same as in Nashville where I felt like in Nashville it was just this big WordPress community and if somebody didn't wanna work on a site, well it was passed along to another WordPress developer and in Denver it's not really that way. It's very much like a zero sum game. Like if I get this client, you don't get this client. I don't work that way. If your developer, I mean, developers are introverts and I am definitely an introvert. About half the day I'm an introvert. The other half of the day I would love to be like on Broadway. The point is, is developers one way or another, if they are doing their job they have got a healthy network of people that they are working with even if they are super introverts. My developer Cindy is incredibly introverted. She doesn't wanna talk on the phone. She wants to do everything via Slack but she has gotta plug it on the repository. She's interested in what's happening at WordCamps and if she doesn't know how to do something she knows three people who do know how to do it. So the stronger that your developer's network is, the stronger your website is gonna end up being. And my favorite question to ask a developer is if you weren't gonna do this for me who would you recommend to do it for me? It's kind of an extension of checking with the community but what I have found as a developer is that I will back myself into a corner. I will think that I can do something and then realize that I can't do it. And if you find yourself in that corner and there is nobody to just like drop a rope to help you out, you're gonna be a lot slower. You may not be able to give the client what they want. And so asking that question if you weren't gonna do this for me who would you recommend can kind of give you some insight into both what their network looks like and what their relationships with other developers look like. You definitely also wanna ask about their hourly rate because if their hourly rate intimidates you then the cost of your project is gonna intimidate you even more. I started out billing at about $25 an hour and now our agency bills at 125 and both of those in my opinion right now are about 20% too low. I'm relatively new to running a consistent team where we are like all there 40 hours a week. So it's been interesting for me to think about what that hourly rate looks like. So I mean that SOAP website that I built I was absolutely not worth $125 an hour. I would have laughed in somebody's face if they had said you should start out charging $125 an hour for your WordPress development. Absolutely not. It is a spectrum. People have a lot of different reasons for charging what they do per hour. The alternative is to say a flat project rate like I did with Linda to begin with where I said I will do this whole thing for you for $800 and end up making like $4 an hour. So whether you're working with a freelancer or you're working with an agency there is overhead that goes into development and if your developer is charging too little then you're gonna run into a problem eventually because the developer's not gonna wanna be a developer anymore. If you can't pay your rent, if you're struggling to pay your rent and also pay Adobe every month then you're not gonna wanna continue doing that. It doesn't matter how much you love development. So looking at that hourly rate can tell you a lot about where they are and on either end it can set off red flags. I've got some developers that I work with who charge $150, $200 an hour and they are absolutely worth it because they're incredibly efficient. So as you're looking at that hourly rate you wanna think about your tolerance for how much you're gonna spend but you also wanna think about what that signaling to you what the developer is signaling to you about how much their time is worth. I feel like that probably could be like a panel or a talk in and of itself. So the next thing that I would recommend to you guys is if you have the opportunity do something small with the developer before you just jump in a whole hog to building the actual website. Some stuff that I have done like that has been installing one of those like slide outs or popovers for email address collection. That was a really good way to start. But if you have the luxury of kind of giving this developer a test drive it'll give you a lot of information about the way that they communicate and what kind of approach they take to project management which can be really important as you scale up with the amount of work that you're doing. And like the hourly rate you should ask your developer you should and try to sense they may know they may not know they may not wanna be honest with you about it. I've been in situations where I don't wanna tell somebody that I am indeed looking for a full-time job because I'm ready to pull my hair out I do not wanna be a freelance developer anymore. But ideally when you're picking a development partner you're picking somebody who's gonna be around for at least the life of this iteration of the website if not for all of the websites you ever wanna build. Just like we had to give the dogs time to orient themselves to the new apartment in Denver and we expected CC to P on the floor several times like this is just her way of being frustrated with a new environment. There's still a learning curve to that relationship between client and developer and so you want to be able to give them room for that. And so the more that you can maintain a consistency between you and a developer and the consistency with that relationship for the long-term, you're gonna avoid a lot of frustration over the long-term. We have a line item with some projects that we call discovery and literally all that it is is we're gonna have to dig into the back of this website and figure out how it was built so we can figure out if we can even help you at all. If you have a relationship with a developer for a long-term who built your first website and now that you are building an enterprise level website that developer is gonna know where the website came from and why things are the way that they are just like if you're building a house and you don't understand why this light switch is right here like how did this happen? Well, the guy who built this wall knows exactly why because something over here is completely getting in the way of it even though this might have been a better place to put it from like a user experience standpoint but if you are constantly getting new developers which I've seen happen over and over people will go through multiple developers one of our clients right now we are her fifth agency. I wanna stop that because I want to maintain the institutional and personal knowledge that you build up over the course of this relationship because it starts to pay off. Stuff gets done quicker. Stuff gets done more efficiently and your relationship it's easier because you've learned how to talk with each other you've established that common vocabulary. And the other part of this as far as like figuring out how long someone's gonna be around so you can figure out if you're going to establish a long relationship is whether or not they offer support packages. That's almost a red flag for me anymore. I worked with an agency in Nashville a couple of years ago that was dead set against providing support packages so they weren't formalizing the ongoing relationship with their client at all and therefore they had no ongoing relationship with their client. All they wanted to do was build the site and get out and that is not my ammo at all. Like if anything I want to be there for the long haul like get the website built that's totally fine don't care about the bill. Let's have a long term relationship if they offer support packages or if they have any sort of formal agreement for an ongoing relationship that can tell you that they do plan to be around for a long time. Another good way to tell how long they're gonna be around and kind of tell if they're worth their salt or not is to ask what they recommend about security. If they have thoughts on security and they're not simple thoughts but it becomes a conversation that tells you that the developer is constantly thinking about how to keep sites secure on an ongoing basis and reevaluating their own workflow. A couple of years ago we moved from using A2 hosting and SiteGround to using SiteGround and WP Engine and the reason that we did that is because WP Engine is just providing this like fantastic security from their offsite backups to their one point restore all of these tools that made our lives easier. So if the developer has an opinion and it's a complex opinion about how to keep your site secure depending on what your site does that can tell you how seriously they take your ongoing satisfaction because there's nothing that will make a client more unhappy than their site being hacked. The number one question and the number one thing that you should look for that you should listen for have your ears perked up for at all times is if a developer tells you that something can't be done with WordPress. That's absolutely a lie period and a story. It can all be done with WordPress. Now, should it all be done with WordPress? No, there are definitely points that you get to where it should not be done with WordPress. Is the answer actually the developer can't do it with WordPress because that's probably more accurate. And if the developer is telling you that it can't be done with WordPress what they're actually saying is I can't do it and I don't want to figure out how to do it or who should do it. And that right there signals to me that they don't really want a relationship with you. They just want a transactional relationship where we build the website CMI. So they're beyond that. And honestly, if I ever hear that from a developer I almost, I write them off immediately unless there is some sort of caveat to that. If it can't be done with WordPress they say it can't be done with WordPress. I'm like, let me go Google and find that out. I freelance project managed for an agency up in Boston and the developer that they were using said that repeatedly and it was the most frustrating experience of my life mostly because I was able to go Google and find out if you couldn't do it with WordPress. So the real answer was that she couldn't do it herself. Some other red flags. If they are using a bajillion plugins to accomplish something that could have been done much more simply by customizing a child theme or doing something to the core. There are reasons to use plugins but there are plenty of reasons to not overload your site with plugins. It can impact a lot of things like SEO, user experience. The plugins can break each other. So the simpler that you can keep the back end of the site, the healthier your site's going to be on the front end. So the friend of mine in Nashville, his name's Brett and he develops a plugin on the repository called the Simple Staff List. And it's a great way to get super simple functionality on your website, but it's also a way to enable somebody who's not a developer to get this functionality on your website. If you're actually a developer, you probably would want to think about building a custom post type that was meant to go along with the rest of the site. So the reason that all of these plugins on there can like they can be a problem from the beginning but then they can also be a problem in an ongoing way. If you've got all of these different pieces of code running simultaneously on your installation, it gets hard to future proof it because you kind of can't guarantee that one author over here doesn't decide to just stop updating their plugin and then this other author over here just like, I'm gonna rebuild it from the ground up and then all of a sudden something breaks. The more plugins that you throw on there, the more opportunity there is for that. So you can't, it's not the end of the story. Like you can't establish how good of a developer is by asking them how many plugins they average on their site, but it's something to think about and it's one of those questions to ask. It's gonna give you a bigger picture of whether or not this is somebody that you wanna work with. Another head flag is if they're not gonna provide you with any training. This agency in Nashville that I worked with, I worked exclusively as a sort of emergency project manager. She had lost her project manager because the project manager was woke up one morning and didn't wanna go into work and didn't tell anybody. And the way that this agency owner found that out was that a client called her and said we're all on the phone for this conference call. Where is project manager? Hope project manager had quit. So I went into this agency with like a lot of opinions and then started to see things that really gave me a whole ton of red flags. And one of them was that she didn't provide training once the site was ready to launch. So if your developer doesn't have a plan in place for training you on how to do what it is that they implemented on your website, then you really don't want any part of that. There needs to be some sort of training. Now whether that's with the developer or whether it is with someone like me who is more inclined to sit and hold someone's hand through them like sobbing uncontrollably about how they don't understand why they need a Facebook account to have a Facebook page, then that has actually happened to me. Like I tried for 45 minutes to explain why you need the account first and it was she never got it. She started crying. It was upsetting for both of us. If your developer does not have some sort of infrastructure in place, if they are not immediately asking you about what the plan is for launch, if they're not asking about deadlines, if they don't have some sort of breakdown of what the project looks like, sometimes this can happen in a project proposal if you break it down by phase. But if the developer is not talking about that, if they're not talking about how to break the site down and establish benchmarks for okay, we're at this point now and beyond this point, like we're gonna continue moving forward, we're not gonna do anything beyond that and if they can't articulate that to you, then that really signals a problem with communication that you need to be wary. And the biggest one that I have seen that is the most fun to talk about over drinks is if your developer is related to you in any way or if you are sleeping with them, maybe don't have them build your business website. At least three clients have come to me, one of them, he and his girlfriend broke up and she owned his domain. She owned his website and she owned his email account. That was an awesome breakup. She took his entire site down because she was mad and I'm sure they were fighting over who was gonna keep the cat too, so here is a pawn that we can use in this breakup. That's why if you are dating someone, do not let them build your website. If you're dating somebody and they have an opinion about your website, absolutely listen and then turn around and ask them, okay, so who's actually gonna build this for me? So if you've got a personal relationship with the person, you really need to think twice before you enter into that because you don't want the stress of the development to then turn around into, oh, you don't have a website and you also don't own your domain, so go register something else and reprint your business cards. So I want to leave you with a few tips on how to cultivate a relationship with your development partner once you have chosen who you wanna work with. Starting a relationship with a developer or an agency where they have a developer on staff is really similar to getting a cat and so that's why I really think that developers are like cats and clients are like dogs. Even for people who hate cats, I promise you that there is a perfect match for you out there. I am allergic to most cats. I kind of don't like them. They don't validate me enough, but there are a couple of cats in my life who I'm utterly smitten with. There is somebody out there for you, but in order to make that relationship work, it's gonna take effort. First thing that you need to do is provide a litter box and a scratching post. If you let that cat into your house with nowhere for it to go to the bathroom and nothing for it to work out its energy on, it's gonna destroy your couch and pee on your carpet. You have to teach your developer or your development partner if it's an agency. You have to teach them how to treat you. If you've got a project manager and account manager in the mix, that's gonna make that process a lot easier, but you are still in the position where as the client you are in charge of the terms of the relationship. If you know that you only have two hours a week available to take calls from them, if you've only got an hour a week that you can work on content, establish that up front so that there aren't any surprises. If you genuinely anticipate that this website is gonna take six months from conception to launch, then let them know that up front. There is never a problem with actually setting that stuff out front and setting those expectations up front. It's gonna make everybody a lot happier because in the absence of information, everybody's gonna fill in expectations without actually talking about it and then it's gonna be like, well, I thought this was gonna be done in three weeks and the developer's like, are you crazy? So I really, I understand that this is easier said than done because I'm terrible about managing my own time. I was so proud of myself because I got here 10 minutes ahead of when I thought that I was going to and that never, ever happens. And I will spend 14 hours a day at my desk. I will, I'm terrible at it. I have to have some outside input for that. If you are proactive about communicating to your developer what they can expect from you and who you are, like if you know that that client is gonna email you at eight o'clock every night, it can help you to reduce, it can help the developer to reduce their anxiety and therefore you're gonna have a better relationship with them. And so structure and predictability, I mean, this is kind of like tried and true dog training, right? But it works with your developer too. It probably works better than it does with your pets because you can communicate with them. Often agencies will already have some infrastructure in place. I really like to use teamwork. I'm obsessed with teamwork right now but I've worked in Trello and Asana and Basecamp and I've worked in Google Spreadsheets. But if you are engaging a solo developer, if you're engaging a freelancer they might not have something in place. So you should work to decide up front what is going to structure your communication. Are you gonna do it all in a project management system? Do you really wanna have a relationship where you are texting the developer and the developer is texting you at three a.m. One of the people who was involved in planning WordCamp Denver, Erin Flynn, she's, her stuff is awesome. You guys should absolutely check her out. She's more focused on helping developers be developers than she is on helping clients not kill their developers. But she helped me to understand that, that if you will decide up front what the structure of your communication will be, like in her contract, she has a line item in her contract that says if you contact me via Facebook, this voids the contract. She does not want to be contacted via Facebook. So if you can find that out ahead of time that really like she needs for Facebook to be a personal space for her, it's gonna help you to avoid some landmines along the way and it's gonna set expectations for everybody that's gonna make the communication easier on an ongoing basis. And I mean along those lines like I, just like Erin doesn't want anybody to contact her via Facebook. I have got one client right now who emails me probably six times a day and the email thread is epic. I mean we have started like I'm gonna be in blue now and we're gonna address these questions and then she comes back and like, I'm gonna answer the questions in green. It's absolutely nuts. Think about whether or not your communication style could overwhelm your developer because if the developer is constantly getting dings if I have a new email or I have a Facebook message or they're texting me or calling me at all hours, it's gonna be harder for them to actually do their job. So establishing that personal space up front, that sort of like this is my dance space, this is your dance space. And I don't think that I truly understood that until this last year when they really started ramping up very interesting stuff. But also some interesting stuff happened when we moved to Denver and that was that Annie and CeCe started sleeping in their own crates. That upset me, honestly. Like they started wanting to sleep in their crates and I'm like, do you not love me anymore? And I realized that I was getting way better sleep by not having them in the bed with me. And I love sleeping with them, but what I realized is that I needed those eight hours a night to actually like sleep and rest and recuperate. And then if I do want to like have them cuddled up with me under a blanket, I will go take a nap and that is enough for me now. If you can establish that with your developer, that you get what you need out of your developer that one day a week when you have the 30 minutes to take a nap with them as opposed to let's sleep together every night. I wanna be with you all the time. This is an awesome project. It's really going to help you guys to like keep your sanity and the developer to keep their sanity. And the last thing is that I wanna leave you with before I go into questions is before we moved to Colorado, CeCe had been a 100% like puppy pad, pee and inside dog. Even when Annie came along and didn't seem to face CeCe that Annie was going outside a few times a day to go to the bathroom, she had her pad, it was in a private spot, nobody was around, nobody had to look at her while she peed, which baffles me that this dog is like has private bathroom issues. But when we moved to Colorado, all of a sudden it became a problem that Annie wasn't getting to go out, there's CeCe wasn't getting to go outside. And we couldn't figure out what was going on because she kept peeing in the same spot in the hallway. And so we started trying things, we're like maybe we'll move her pad to a different room or we'll give her a place where she can go in and nobody can see her, like we'll figure something out in this tiny little apartment. But what the real issue was is that she had decided all of a sudden that she wanted to go outside whatever Annie did. She doesn't always pee outside, like sometimes it's just, I really wanna smell the rabbits right now. But it fixed the problem. And so if you can look at the way that your developer's acting, if they're doing something that's driving you absolutely crazy, using vocabulary that you don't know, telling you no repeatedly, if you can look at their behavior and think about why they might be behaving that way, if you can listen to them and try to figure out what it is about your behavior that might be driving them crazy, you will start to realize how to better manage this developer. Because if you're engaging a freelance developer, you really are going to have to be the project manager yourself. Some developers are pretty organized, but honestly, if you are coming along and somebody is like, I'm gonna build this structure for you, you're going to have to be the one who manages that. And the only way to manage it is to actually listen to what your developer's telling you, whether they're telling you in a language you can understand or not. So as you were looking, and this is something that I heard at WordCamp US and I absolutely loved it. In fact, I went and bought the boots that the girl who gave the talk was wearing. She said, when you are hiring a developer, or you are hiring an agency, you are not hiring an employee, you are hiring a partner. And I mean, it's the same thing with the dogs, right? I mean, they're clearly not like bringing in any money, but it really is like a mutually beneficial relationship here. It is not a transactional one, even though there is definitely money changing hands. The nature, especially as we just get more and more into living on the internet, the relationship needs to be one of someone who is gonna help you to achieve your goals while you are helping them achieve their goals. And so, whether you end up having a relationship with a developer who you're partnered for 10 years or you're partnered until both of you die, the longer term relationship that you can build, if you think about it as a partnership, as opposed to a transactional relationship, it'll really pay off big time. Even if the relationship ends, you still have a positive relationship with that old developer, it's gonna make your new developer's life so much easier. I make that a priority for all of my clients. I have, from the beginning, I have never, ever, ever wanted to hold a client hostage. I have never wanted a client to feel like they can't go to somebody else who might do a better job for them. And so, if you approach it as a, even if this relationship is gonna end, it's gonna end amicably, and I'm gonna move on to somebody who is better suited for me now and who I am 10 years down the road, as opposed to who I was 10 years ago, that next relationship is gonna be better for you too. So, all of that said, I think we've got maybe five or 10 minutes left for questions. So, does anybody have any questions for me? Does anybody wanna gather around me tomorrow so that when the developers come with their pitchforks and their firebrands that you can protect me? Well, if you have any questions, you can find me on really on Instagram and Twitter. I'm not on Facebook that much. Somebody else in my agency runs the Facebook and I do a lot of just like push this information to Facebook. But you can definitely find me on Instagram and a little bit less on Twitter. And I will have these slides loaded to share with you. And so, on the No Kill website's Twitter account, I'll share a link to this once I get it up on Slideshare. I literally just finished this like an hour ago. So, you'll have these links in there. But this is an excellent, this WP Beginners Glossary is an excellent glossary. They, like I was thinking about building something like that and then I realized that they did it and I was like, I'm just gonna send people over there. It's absolutely beautiful. It's like, it literally is like a dictionary. You can go A, B, C and then click through to the definition of whatever term it is. So, if your developer says something that you don't understand, go check that out and see what it is WP Beginner has to say. And along, in the spirit of coming to any developer that you might wanna engage in a relationship with, coming prepared, I have got a Google form that I built that is a version of the intake form that I use for all of the new very interesting clients. But what it will do is as you fill it out, it'll kind of structure your thinking about what it is you want out of your relationship with your developer, what it is you want out of a website build and that way it'll email you all of the answers that you put into the form yourself and then you can take that to whatever developer you wanna talk to and say, here's what I'm thinking, what more information do you need from me? So, that will take care of pretty much all of the low hanging fruit that really everybody should be asking you in an intake form and it'll get you closer to actually starting development rather than having that long, on-boring process. And then I've been using the hashtag forever home page and so that's really with this idea that's the hashtag I wanna associate it with. So, if you're interested in hearing more, Instagram has the hashtag subscription feature and that is pretty much it. Thanks you guys.