 Thank you everyone for being here this morning. I know it's early, but you managed to come. How is it going? How is your day going so far? Good. Is someone here for the first time at a WordCamp? Yay! Welcome! That's great! That's really great. Well, I'm sure you'll enjoy WordCamp Athens. It's an amazing event. The organizing team is one of the best I ever worked with in a couple of years of mentoring WordCamps, so thank you for having me. So today I'm here to talk about websites for freelancers. Is this working? We managed to make everything work. Nope. This is not working. No problem. We'll do it like this. My name is Francesca Marano. I come from Italy, as you can probably tell from the name. I'm the WordPress Community Manager at SiteGround, an international web hosting company. Before that, I was a freelancer making websites for freelancers. That was my job for the past six years. Let's have a show of hands. How many of you are freelancers? How many of you built their own website? Good people. How many of you build websites for other freelancers? It's hard, right? Because freelancers always take care of their own client before taking care of their website. Since you're the one making the website, it'll probably give you the materials very late. They'll be busy doing other stuff, so you have a very hard job. I feel for you. I'm very empathic of your situation because that's what I did for the past six years. This is where this talk comes from. The main thing I would like you to take home is awareness. This is the keyword for this presentation. In 30 minutes, that's so much we can do. We can ask ourselves questions. I can give you examples. The thing I really would like to stress as much as possible is awareness. You have to be aware of everything you're doing, even if it seems like a small project. First of all, I think by now no project is really simple or quick. Am I right? When the people come, I just want a simple website. I kid you not. A friend of mine was a freelancer also in Italy. A friend said, I want a simple website, and the website they showed to her was IKEA website. Define simple. The key takeaway here is be aware of everything you do and try to infuse this in your clients as well. Second thing you have to do, you have to become boring as hell and ask a lot of questions for yourself and for your clients. Just be relentless. Ask whatever you want to do for your own website or for a client's website. It doesn't matter. You have to ask a lot of questions before you even start writing a line of code or installing WordPress. Be aware of where you want to go. These are the main questions. Some of them are questions, some are not. These are the main steps you usually should go through when you're making a website. First of all, ask yourself, why? Why do you want a website? Why are your client wants a website? When I was doing client work, I used to send 10 pages questionnaire to clients. Basically, I was asking them why they want a website in five different ways because it was very important for me to talk to people that were really on it. They didn't just want, oh yeah, I want a website because everyone has one. They really wanted a website to serve a purpose for their own business. And then for whom? Who's the reader? Who's the end user of that website? Who's going to use the website? Because the person who owns the website, let's say francescameral.com, is not about me. It's about the people who come and hire me, hopefully. Then you move on to content. Do not even install WordPress unless you have clear on your mind what needs to be there in the website. What pages, what kind of images, branding, what's the call to action. Sketch it down on paper, it's great. And then when you have answered all those stages, then you can move on to design, which is not graphics. So why? Why do you want a website? Those are all reasons not to have a website, okay? Everyone has a website, do you agree with this? Do you think every business needs a website to succeed? Yes? Who says no? Is there someone saying no? Well, do you have a strategy for that website? If you don't have a strategy, don't build a website. If the website is just a way to say your name, take about.com. I think it's still alive by a custom domain and build a page there that says who you are, right? Or if you're a local business and you cannot really invest in content creation or content marketing, just get a Google My Business thingy. I don't know how you do it. I think someone knows how to do it. And then put your business there. Or maybe you're a crafter, an artisan. You make very few pieces every year and you sell them through galleries. Why would you have a website? So, you know, I don't necessarily think that everyone needs a website. Having a website hoping to rank first in Google, that's just wrong. All right? If someone comes to you and tells you, I'm going to do your website and they're going to rank first on Google, they're lying. Because it's not the website that makes you rank first. It's the content, it's the SEO, it's the marketing, all right? Your website itself is not enough. So, any reason that is not supported by a goal, the why, and a strategy, the execution, then just no. All right. Don't waste your time. But there are great reasons to have a website. For example, you want to promote your brand awareness. You want to tell more about yourself. You want to build a reputation online. So, when I started making websites, I lived about 3,000 kilometers from my target market. And the only way for them for me to reach them was through a blog. So, I started blogging every week about at the time I was more into social media than front-end development. So, you know, I talk about how I use social media, how I started building websites. Where did I learn it all? I also told a little bit about myself because these people could not meet me in person. So, it was important for me that they knew that I was a real person and that I was doing this. I was the one behind everything there, right? Sales. Well, if you want to sell online, you need an e-commerce. So, that's a good reason to have a website. Again, just having an e-commerce will not help you sell. That's just the medium. You will need probably content marketing, social media promotion, AdWords, SEO optimization, and whatever. So, any reason basically that it's supported by your goal and a strategy that you're going to implement to reach your goal, that's a good reason to have a website. Who is the center of this website? It's not you. All right. The site might have your name, but it's not about you. It's about one person. One buyer persona. That's what we call it in marketing. Have you ever heard of a buyer persona, the concept? Who has heard of it? Okay. So, basically what you do. So, I suggest you go and Google both buyer persona and customer journey. You'll find a lot of templates online that you can use to define who's your target and how you get them from being aware of you, to purchasing, to repurchasing, and to become a client and not just a fan. So, one thing I learned from building websites is the more vertical you go into a niche, the more successful you'll be. If you think you're going to do generic websites for everyone, that's where you get stuck. That's where it will be very hard to find clients. Well, it won't be very hard to find clients. It will be very hard to find good paying clients and satisfied clients, right? So, my target market, for example, was women like me in the late 30s at the time. That were going through a career transition. Some of them had kids and they couldn't, I don't know if you have this in Greece, but in Italy, it's very hard to go back to your workplace after you have one or two kids. We don't really do well on that, right? So, a lot of women in their late 30s, early 40s after one or two kids have a really hard time going back to their company. So, they start their own businesses. So, that's where I focus because I knew their struggles and I also knew how to code. So, I was the right person for them because I could empathize with what they were going through and I could understand what were their struggles and what they were going with their career. So, build a buyer persona, go online, find a template, give them a name. It's an exercise, it's a very boring exercise that everyone that has a building, has a website and wants to do something online should go through. So, you define who this person is and you define it very specifically, like age, sex, where do they live, what do they do, give them a name, give them a face, right? And that's the person you're going to build your website for. And the customer journey is the journey that this person will go through from the stage where they're like, oh, I need a website to the moment they approach you. They ask for a quote, you get them a quote and they'll buy for you from you, hopefully. So, always think who is the person, the real person you're solving a real problem for, right? This is why I stress a lot about goals and strategy and knowing exactly who you're catering to because otherwise it's very hard to sell to the right people. And then we go to content. This should become the mantra of every service provider that has a website. It's not about you, no one cares about you, okay? When the people come to your website to buy your services, they care about their needs and how you can solve them. So, for example, in your About page, it's great that you list your hobbies and stuff like that, but tell me what you can do to solve my problem, all right? Try not to be self-indulgent. It's really not about you. It's about the reader who will hopefully go through the customer journey and become a client because that's their mindset. They're coming to your website because they want something, they need something, they have a problem, and they want you to solve the problem for them. This is true also if you have a blog. How many of you have a blog? All right, do you get comments what people ask in the blog? There are recurring patterns, that's your opportunity. Because that's the problem they have, and that's what they want you to solve. So try to focus on this person. This is why you do the buyer persona exercise. Try to understand what they need, what's their pain, what can you do for them? So for me, it was building websites for women who were not really tech savvy. The first thing most of them said was, I am afraid the website will explode. Have you ever seen a website explode? They can't explode. A server can explode, but the website cannot explode. There can be errors that you solve through debugging usually. So that was the thing. That was my target. So I needed to talk to this target. I could not tell them about debugging. I could not talk to them about server errors. The language was, don't worry, websites don't explode. And I'll help you make sure nothing bad will happen to your website. And I'll build a website for you that you'll know how to use. And I'll support you. Most websites I did in my life, it took me very few hours to do the websites. And a lot of hours of support and caring and answering to question. And then the other thing is like, oh, I have a stupid question. No, it's not a stupid question because if 10 people ask me the same thing, it means that that's an opportunity. I have to build something for that. I have to make it easier for people. So remember, it's not about you. And after you go through all the stages, you finally come to design. So I said before, design is not graphics. Design is not choosing a font or choosing a color. Design is solving a problem. Make it easy for people to find their way. Say no to lipstick on a pig. I don't know how many of you work in Europe. Do you know of John Maida? He's a very influential designer. He was the head of MIT Labs. He said, say no to lipstick on a pig. Which means putting the nice graphics afterwards. That's not design. Design is making it easy for people to find their way and find the solution to their problem. Make it easy and make it unambiguous. What do I mean by unambiguous? Did you ever go into a website and you were given 20 instructions? Buy this. Go to the blog. Leave a comment. Share on social media. Sign up for the newsletter. What am I supposed to do here? Do you know what a call to action is? Say no to that. Say no to the cute graphics because they're cute. Are they functional to your message? Are they functional to your mission? Who is to solve that client problem? Then use it. Otherwise, drop it. Today, having a fast website is way more important than have a cute website. So that's what you're aiming for with your design and with your code. Especially front-end developers should be really aware that, you know, speed optimization for a website starts there with the endless lines of CSS that you put and they don't really need to be there. So aim for that. Aim for speed. Aim for clarity. Aim for clear instructions. Don't go for the cute font. No one cares about the cute font. It's not the 90s when we started being able to use nice fonts instead of just aerial and times. We got it. We can use nice font. We're choosing not to use them because they will slow the performance of a website. So what should go into this website? Well, about page, right? Again, it's not about you unless you are doing something that requires a degree and you don't know how it works in Greece. But, you know, in Italy, if you're a lawyer, you need to be inscribed in this book of all the lawyers in Italy, I guess the same in Greece. So unless you do that, so you need to say that you have a degree and all the official stuff, no one cares if you took a computer science class 20 years ago, all right? I took an HTML class in 1999. If I say this, my client will be like, well, there were, I don't know how many major releases of HTML between 1999 and today. So maybe they could also reflect poorly on my capacity as a front-end developer. Sales page. Again, it's not about you. What are you selling that is helping these people, your customers, your readers? It's not about you. Don't make products because they work for your ego. They need to work for your wallet. And the only way to make it work for your wallet is to make a product that people want, other people, not you. And then you need a contact. This is about you. Choose a way that people can contact you that it's comfortable for you. For example, I hate when people contact me on Facebook because that's my private space. I hang out with my friends. I check what my son is doing online. So if a client, and I have a page. So if you send me a message through my page, that's great. But if you go into my personal profile and send me a message, that's a huge no for me. I'm not going to get you on board as a client. But if you don't want people to contact you through Facebook, don't put your Facebook address in that, all right? Or if you don't want people to phone you up, don't put your phone number. I know it sounds stupid, but I made all those mistakes, right? So I'm not, I think you'll do better than I did. But just saying I made all those mistakes we talked about. The legal stuff that's really important. Check in your nation. What are the requirements for a business website? For example, in Italy, if you sell something, you need to be, you need to be a registered business and have your VAT number in it. And in a blog, again, it's not about you. It's about the readers, the users. Use all the things that WordPress gives you to make it easy for people to go around your website, search bar, tags, categories, whatever can help the people stay in the website and read more, use it. If you tell me how much it will cost to work for you, that's a one million bonus. I hate wasting time. I have very little time when I need to buy something, when I need to hire someone. So I want to know what's the price range, right? It's very hard to say that the site will cost X euros unless you package them. So you can say starting from. So if I have less money than that, I will not contact you. I, as a customer, will not lose time. You, as a supplier, will not waste time. Win-win for everyone. And then there's nice to have. Minibio. Like we said, brand awareness, right? You are your own brand as a freelancer. So it's nice to have, do you know what I mean? It's like, either in the sidebar or in the footer, you'll have a minibio that say, hi, I'm Francesca. This is what I do and you can hire me. And links to social media. Again, do you have a strategy? Do you have a social media strategy? Great. Use the social media. Otherwise, drop it. If you put a Twitter account and there's nothing there, that reflects really poorly on you as a professional, right? So just put the links that have something meaningful in. Testimonials. Did someone use your services and they're happy with it? Ask them for a few lines and show them somewhere. That's always a nice touch. Newsletter sign up form. Again, only if you have a strategy. If you send me, and that's what I do. I just want you to know that all the bad things that I'm saying are the bad things that I did in six years, either for me or for my clients. Some of them I still do. Like the newsletter sign up. I have a newsletter sign up. I don't remember where. Honest to God. I have no idea where is that because no, sometimes I get these people signed up for your newsletter. I'm like, where's the form? I don't remember where I put the form, but sometimes people sign up and I never send the newsletter. So you created the expectation. People sign up. They hope to receive something meaningful from you. And then you never write. So I have to find that form and remove it, but I never have time to do it. So anyway, people keep signing up and then I feel that I have to write something and it's awful. Popular posts. If you have a popular blog and you think this will help with the flow, use it. So we are 25 minutes more or less. Here it says five. I don't know why I'll go with mine. I'm going to show you a little bit of examples. Who knows who Paul Jarvis is. So if you're a freelancer, I urge you to go into his website and sign up for his newsletter. He's really good. He sends it every Sunday. He calls it the Sunday dispatch. He has some e-courses for freelancers. He's a really cool dude. He doesn't have kids. He has rats, rat pets. Disgusting and cute at the same time. So that was his page in 2015. I took the screenshot in 2015. Paul Jarvis used to make websites. Today's business model is completely changed. I'm Paul Jarvis. I help people build better, not bigger businesses. He removed everything, basically everything he had in the home page, and he just left the sign up for the newsletter. That's his goal. That's the whole strategy behind this website. You're there to leave your address, and he will send you meaningful content every week. This is a WordPress developer from the UK. It's a business-focused WordPress development. That's the slogan. Whoever built a website used something like that in their website. But he says, by getting to know your business, I can build a website that matches your goals, not mine. That's a very important sentence there. He's telling you that it's not about him. It's about you. And it keeps going. There's a lot of you here. Your website, your rankings, so it's not about him. He disappeared. You don't even have a picture of him. He's not relevant. You're relevant. This is an example of something done very badly and something done very well. So the whole part on top says a ton of things. Where am I supposed to click? He writes books. He has a daily podcast. He hosts a thing. So all the blue things are links, but then he gets to what he wants me to do. He wants me to buy that book, and then you can see where the design is coming in. The part above, by the way, you can remove it by clicking any of the items in the menu. Which I think is a very poor design choice. There should be a place in that header that says toggle, whatever, because that's really a lot of content that I don't need. Edie Bez. I wonder why she decided to make, until you're making the... Well, I know why, because money is way more interesting than defining who you are. But solo business owners like you. Again, she's telling already who's her target, who are her clients. Are you a solo business owner? Great, then you're my people. Otherwise, get out of here. I don't have anything for you. She gives a little bit of... too many, in my opinion, places to go. Start reading, go biz shopping, get your discount, but they're all very clear, right? You cannot be confused. The wording is very clear, the design is very clear. You know what will happen when you'll click one of those buttons. And if the thing you're expecting to happen doesn't happen, that's bad, because you want the discount. If you get to that place and there is not a discount, that's not great. Or disappear completely and let your work do the talk. That's beautiful. She has four or five items in that slider that if that's what I'm looking for, I'm hooked. I want it. I'm going to hire her. So as we said, this is really the thing. This is the key takeaway from this talk. I hope you'll tell yourself that every time you approach a new client, a new project, because when you clarify your message, people will listen and ultimately they will buy. Thank you. I think we have a little bit of time for questions. And after this, I'm going to go to the side ground booth. So if you still have questions, I'll be there the whole day. And you can the side ground booth. Yes, it's right after right outside the door. I'll be there all day. So if you have questions now or later, look for me. Thank you. Thank you. If we have questions for the French, we'll have a microphone from the guys on the side to ask them our questions. I have a quick question. Yeah, feel free. Feel free. Yeah. So it seems like the Italian clients require an IKEA website as a simple one. Here it's like Facebook. But not exactly. Because we don't want to exaggerate. We are being realistic about it. Perhaps you have a message for women who want to go and feel more free to enter into tech business. Do you think a freelancer as a woman was that weird or more difficult? I'm being, you know, I'm being straight. Yes, I appreciate that. Actually, it was easier to start as a freelancer than going into an office because then I was master of my domain and no one could be sexist with me. Because it was just me. I did have a client actually at some point come and say to me, we really want to work with you but you seem to work only with women so we don't really feel like hiring you. Which is okay. That was my target market. So that's okay. If a dude doesn't want to work with me, probably I don't want to work with someone that says something like that. In general, I feel... So I've been, you know, attending tech-related conferences since I was a kid because my parents were both developers. So I'm a second generation woman in tech and I find that the WordPress community in general is way more female-friendly than any other tech community I ever met. So we do as much as we can to encourage many women to come on board. There are a lot of great initiatives for women to start develop and to go on board as contributors to open source projects. If you'll have me, I'll give a talk about that next year because it's a subject I'm very passionate about. But I will tweet out some resources for outreach programs both for developers and women speakers. That's a challenge that I think a lot of conferences have. You did a great job. You have an amazing diverse lineup. But a lot of conferences don't get that level of diversity so there are also resources. But in general, I honestly feel that the ecosystem, both the community and the business ecosystem are very female-friendly. So if you still ladies in the house, if you still have some doubts about joining as a developer, as a freelance developer, or try to get hired from companies, please don't. And also come to talk to me at the SiteGround booth and we can talk about that more. From the crowd. I mean, where all these lists, on display they seem so simple. Yet we all do the mistakes. Do we have to do the mistakes first? Yes. That's the catharsis. We talk about it. That's what the Greek tragedy is about, isn't it? We have the chorus. We all come together. We cry about the mistakes we made as developers. We understand crying about our mistakes. No, no, no. We cry together. There's the choir of women there in the tragedy of Sophocles or whatever. And then at the end, we go through the catharsis and we become better service providers. It's a human thing. Yes. Thank you very, very much. Francesca.