 Okay, so who here makes websites for clients? Okay, we all feel the pain then. If you don't make websites for clients, people are prone to messing things up. It's a thing, it just happens. So there's two things you can do. One, you can just release the site to the client and say, you can handle this, you can manage it. And the other option is to manage it yourself, and that means you get paid usually. People don't usually charge enough for managing websites. It's a big deal, especially when you're working with a company who relies on their websites to generate customers to manage their online presence, which most small businesses and medium and even large businesses do. But one thing disclaimer I have is I'm going to give you a couple of tips today, but there's absolutely no way you will absolutely client-proof your WordPress install. There are some words that I would use if this was not a family-friendly event, and clients like to do those things. They find a way every single time. They find a website for a client, and they work with athletes, and I have a feeling that the athletes are the ones that are editing the sites, even though this is a multinational organization. So with that client, for example, we do a hosting plan that's a couple thousand dollars a month, and we take away features from them. So the more you pay us, the more features we take away. And then that provides a great service for the client. But again, since I am 18, if you are listening to advice from an 18-year-old, you've probably made some bad decisions in your life, and this is where you're ending up, so let me make you not feel as bad. As she mentioned, I do run a marketing agency. I have 60 team members, and it's called Pixelco Labs. It started in Dallas. It started when I was 16 years old, or it started when I was 14 actually. I started making websites for my mom and family friends because I was bullied a lot and I had nothing to do with my time. It turned out well. I wouldn't recommend it for anybody. It just worked out well for me. So Pixelco Labs has been named number one in North Texas, a digital marketing agency. And as far as hosting revenue goes, in the past couple of years, this is what we've been able to do in quarterly hosting revenue. So the advice that I'm giving you today, when we build out installs for clients, what we're doing is a fully custom install, and we're saying you're probably not going to see anything that looks exactly like the WordPress dashboard when you get a website from us, because we want to make sure you're only seeing things that you need to manage. But today, with my advice for you, I'm going to be explaining things that you can do that aren't as intensive, things like using plugins on WordPress that make it really easy to make the website more manageable for clients. You can add another zero to your hosting monthly retainer. So yeah, white screen of death. Who knows about it? So the white screen of death is a joke. It's just a random reaper. Antiskrupies. I was supposed to get a better laugh. But yeah, so I created an install for WordPress installation from scratch for this, and I just built it out the way I would recommend you all do it. So we start with the fresh install, for example. And if you look here, you can see on the admin screen, when you're a WordPress admin, you have everything from settings to plugins. The most dangerous part of the WordPress admin is the plugins section because plugins are pretty and people like to install plugins for some reason. But yeah, adding users, the tools, things like WordPress imports, there's a lot of things that your client won't need for their site. And just to make things easier, what I would recommend is just making your client a separate account and putting them as an editor. Because when you have someone as an editor, well, my slides aren't working. So I'm going to try the computer. There we go, okay. Now they all went forward, great. You're laughing, I'm crying. Okay, let's see. Here, okay, got it, finally. That didn't take too long. So you can see, I made an editor account for... Really? There we go, editor account. Okay, so when you go into WordPress, you have the option to make someone a subscriber and editor an administrator. There are a couple of other options, but editor is one step down from administrator. So the first option that you have on that first screen, I'm just going to start using the computer. It turns all the options that you have on the first screen. The appearance, plugins, tools, things that the website builder should be using, whoever's building the website. And it gets rid of a lot of them. So you can see, the only things that I would recommend not having are the profile and tools. The profile is good if you have a client who's posting blogs because they can edit their icon, their face icon, they can edit their name and how it shows up on the blog, their bio. But otherwise, if your client's just editing things on a static website, like content on a web page, you're typically not going to need even that section. So you can get rid of the profile and tools. And you would do that with something, a plugin. One that I'm showing you today is Admin Menu Editor. The great thing about this plugin, it's been around for a while. Not the best user experience, but it does the trick if you can figure it out. And, well, there's the user experience. You can make your own inferences. If you go through, you have the ability to, for example, get rid of some options for the editor. And this is an example of getting rid of your profile section for the editor. So when you log back in, the editor only sees comments, pages, media and posts. All the content on the website. And that's all they'll probably need. So here's another plugin that I would recommend to make editing the website a lot easier for clients. It's TinyMCE Advanced. And what it does is it's free. You can use this WordPress interface. The visual editor is what it's called, or whizzywig. Who knows what whizzywig means? It's not as fun as the acronym sounds. Just what you see is what you get. But, yeah, it turns it into this. So you get the options to number one, change the text style with fonts and the size of the text, anything. You can even print from here. And it makes WordPress into an editor, which is really nice for clients who aren't used to writing content on a WordPress website. Because if you're writing content on a WordPress website, WordPress does have a great caching system if you disconnect from the internet. But sometimes if you disconnect from the internet, say you're traveling, WordPress will just delete all your content. Or it won't back it up to where you finished. When you're able to work with something like this, you can save your content just like you would a Word document. So it adds that extended functionality. Let's talk about the dashboards. You can log in. And, essentially, it doesn't serve that much of a purpose for people who aren't making the websites. It doesn't even serve... It's relevant in that number one. It shows local WordPress events. It shows things like the... post quickly. You can do a quick post as what it's called. And right there on the dashboard, you can type the post title name. And then you can move into the editor. But that's not really functionality that your clients will need because they'll just go straight to the editor to add content. So what we've done is... This is an example of an install we used for a client. This one we did use a plugin. I'll be putting this on my website so I'll list out the plugins that I used. And also at the end of this slideshow, there will be a couple of short links you can copy down or take pictures of. But as far as the support goes, we like to make sure clients have support readily accessible to them no matter where they're going to be. So the first thing you can do is write on the WordPress dashboard. The first thing they're going to see is support. Most of our clients have dedicated account managers, but a lot of times we've worked with clients where we have smaller, small business projects and we need to have a team that can address those concerns. For all the clients, they won't necessarily be calling their account manager. They'll be sending a ticket in. And what they see is if they want to do it for hours, typically, at the most. And the goal with this is just to make it a more client-friendly experience. Because you are being paid to make a website and you don't want the website to be, again, easy to break because you will get the white screen of death. It happens... That was all the websites I made in the first year ended up having the white screen of death. And then again, quite recently. It's an old friend of mine. So yeah, I would say that definitely you look for these little tweaks. And these are some great resources. If you want to take pictures of this, again, I'm putting it on my website. They're all going to be bit.ly slash wc-abq and then 0102 and 03. So that's the only difference. The first one is 14 tips to include the WP client experience. This is from WPMU Dev and that's a great resource. No matter what level you are in the WordPress development or WordPress business space, they have content for everybody. It's a great resource. And then here's another one from them and that would be adding custom widgets to the dashboard. It shows you how to do it. This is a little bit more technical. There's not going to be a plugin for this. You're going to be looking at code, putting it into the themesfunctions.php, which is a very simple editor for the theme. You always want to take a backup before you use it, especially if you're me because I like to break things. And then finally, another one is how to make WordPress safe for clients. This covers pretty much the client experience in WordPress on those three posts. I think those are great ones to look at. I wouldn't have time to cover all of them today, but my main goal is just to show you, you're being paid to build a website, but you also have the experience once the website is delivered to the client. So for everybody that makes websites in here, how many of you have a hosting retainer that comes after the website is done? Or how many of you have a support option for your clients? So when I say you're doing the hosting and then the support, but a lot of people just do the support because it's a lot to coordinate when you're doing the hosting. Do you mind if I ask you a question about what you're doing with that? So when you do support, are you doing it on an hourly basis? Are you doing it where it's a monthly retainer? And how does that retainer work? They may be month later or quarter later than just whatever they need to do it. Great. And that's an example of how it's going to be the best way to structure it because that's passive revenue. That's something where whenever someone needs support and whenever a client needs support you're there to help them. Let's say if you build your dashboard really well and you make the website really hard to break, you probably won't be called very often. You give a good documentation right at the beginning and it shows this is how you use the website. And then you have that monthly retainer. First you've made a solid product and they client see value in that. And then there's your additional value because you know how to use those features. And I know that sounds a little sneaky, but when you take some features away and keep some on the administrator side it's giving you the opportunity to prove that you are valuable and the fact that you can use these tools without breaking the site because I saw the hands go up. People know what it's like to have a site be broken and restoring that site if you're not using a managed WordPress host or you're not backing up daily is never easy. So that covers management and I'm happy to answer any questions if anybody has any. Yes. Is there two news for managing work amounts of WordPress installs? Yeah. So do I? No, no, no. I use WP engine. Okay, sorry. So who knows WP engine and manage WP? Either of those. Which one? Sorry, that was a terribly forwarded question. Both, okay. So manage WP tell me if I'm wrong. Manage WP manage WordPress sites on any servers and look at the plugins they need updated, updating, look at the security of the websites. It's not a host, but it is a site manager and it's really affordable. It's wonderful because what you do is you just install a plugin on the site and it gives you the opportunity to give client support and back up the site daily as well as look for security issues, update plugins all from one place for all the sites. You can even automate it. So that's a wonderful option. If you really want some security, if you want to offer an additional value, a lot of times if you bill for hosting and take care of the hosting yourself, you can increase your margins and you can also provide a higher level of value to the clients because with something like WP engine, which is different from manage WP in that it's an actual managed WordPress host like Pantheon for example. So those are the same, they're very similar and they both offer similar services. So what you're doing is you're paying your site secure because sometimes a client won't know if their website's hacked and they'll think it's something they did or they'll think it's something you did. You never have to worry about anything like that when you're working with something like a manager. The last person that spoke would probably be mad at me for using the word never considering that's probably legally dangerous but there's a 99% certainty that you'll never have to worry about a problem with getting your site hacked. That's a good experience. What's the tradeoff between allowing people access to even part of the dashboard versus working through a form? And this is when we get to have some fun. When you say form, I assume you're talking about what type of form? Okay. Okay, great. So are they doing that in the WordPress dashboard or are they doing it? Okay, great. So there's options, you could use things like gravity forms, you could really use the WordPress dashboard and that's the great thing about WordPress user roles is you have everything from subscriber to administrator and there's a great role for you. It'd be the editor role and then under that it'd be a contributor. So people that are contributing content to WordPress, WordPress has this pre-built access and you can say people that can submit content to go into a draft mode and look for, I forget the terminology, but it goes into this pending queue and the editors can publish it. That's not at all. If you can and have them submit their content. I would go that route. I would say, and what she said was that is it better to have it so they go into the dashboards and submit the post or do they use something on the front end to submit the post? Gravity forms as I mentioned has a feature for that. So you can say this person should be treated like a contributor even though they don't have an account and they can submit something that goes into the pending queue. That's probably the way to go. Gravity forms if you want to check that out. I think I saw it. Yes. I don't. I am stubborn. Oh goodness. There are a lot of times where in the beginning, one thing I've noticed just generally is there's this 80-20 rule the more you're getting paid from someone the less they'll need help from you. The less you're getting paid the more the less of a budget, but proportionally it's a lot of money to them. So it's understandable that any time they ask for support they might be doing it more often than the large company that's paying you a bunch more. Number one, they probably have people on their team to manage it. Number two, you're doing something that's a much higher value project when you're working with a larger company typically. But when I talk to somebody, when I look at that first set and say, okay, this relationship, is it going to give you administrator access and then fix things when things go wrong? Which happens. It's really a matter of do you have the time and are they paying you enough to do it? Because it could be very well more work than making the website itself trying to rehabilitate it and bring it back to where it started. It's very easy to click the wrong buttons when you don't know what you're doing. The great thing about WordPress is it's easy to spin up another install. It's easy to create a new site. WordPress is a wonderful platform. You just really want to make sure that you're helping your client understand how to use it if it's their first, second, or third time. There's always things changing in the dashboard. The user experience doesn't align with everything else that the client has probably used. If you look at something like Squarespace or Wix, completely different user experience. WordPress is special in that it's made for a lot of different people, but it's always great to have guidance. How do you work with an editor to use the mobile app for editing? Do some of these rules apply? I think that's with Jetpack. Jetpack is an automatic company. It allows you to connect WordPress.org site and use the WordPress.com infrastructure to post. I think that's wonderful. I think that's great because you can probably I assume we've never done it before, but from what I would imagine you can probably lock that down and say we want this person to be in the contributor role, because WordPress.com has those roles too if I'm not mistaken. See, I think that's a great option. You can still limit things from the WordPress desktop admin that are also limited on mobile. So that would be useful. All right. I think we're good here. How did we do it? How did I do it? Thank you. Last time I got booze. Wow. Appreciate it. Great. If anybody wants to get those slides it will be up on my website after the presentation probably tomorrow. Going to the after party tonight. Thank you very much.