 On the topic of our talk is technical support for graphic designers. How many graphic designers do we have, and do we have any? Yeah, okay. So here's what we're hoping that you will go away with. Is we've been working with graphic designers for exclusively for about the last five years or so. First of all, by way of introduction, I'm Bill Starrett. This is my wife, Rhonda. Hi. In marriage, generally speaking, sometimes opposites tend to attract. So Rhonda is a programmer. I have experienced a little bit of page layout, but I was a project manager before we started our business in 1999. So I had a little bit of page layout, a little bit of project management, and a programmer, and it was her idea to say, let's start a web development company, and this is our 17th year. In the last five years or so, we've been working a lot in Atlanta. We're from Atlanta, working with graphic designers and agencies. And in those situations, they realized that they didn't have in-house developers or technical support, and so they said, let's just find somebody that can do that. They do what they do best, which is create branding and messaging and extend the company's brand and do PR and create beautiful designs, and they leave the technical stuff up to us. So if you have ever in the past been presented with an opportunity and you say, you know, I just do basic informational WordPress sites, this one sounds like it's a little bit beyond my capability. This is an opportunity to maybe say yes, or at least to get that appointment and say, you know, tell me more about this project that you want me to take on, and we're going to show you ways to perhaps bring on a technical support to help you win that job, help you execute that job to the best of your ability, and manage it going forward. So obviously there are differences, and again, generally speaking, right? Some designers are great developers, et cetera, but there are differences between designers and developers, and so we understand that, and we are developers and we use designers. Obviously there's differences between designers and coders, so designers make things look beautiful, function, user interface, coders, write code. The two of those together make the magic happen. So we've got this beautiful WordCamp website, it's a beautiful color scheme, we've got, you know, rounded buttons, we've got a background image of the mountains, and it looks really nice and it functions really well. We've all used the site to register and check the schedule and all that, and so somebody with a design ability put this thing together and behind the scenes, this is what it looks like. So UI, other store 3, 1, 6, 0, 1, 4, you know, blah, blah, blah, and that's code. So a lot of designers look at this and just say, ah, I don't want to see that. So fear not. If you team up with a partner, then there are some advantages to do that and obviously you can rely on your strengths, okay? You are designers, you were created to design, you were born to design, so design, design away and continue to do that. If you take on projects that are outside your core competency, if you've ever done that, we've done it. I do a little, I mentioned I have some page layout ability, I did page maker stuff way back in the 80s, and I've designed a few logos, but if somebody approached me and said, build our website and we need a new branding package, that's not me. Now if their budget and expectation is really low and really small, I might be able to crank out a logo and maybe one concept and two or three revisions, but if there's a company out there that's looking to do a rebranding, I'm going to bring in a graphic designer because when I try to do this myself, I end up having to go to YouTube videos to learn how to do this stuff. It takes me a lot longer, it's costing me money, I shouldn't be doing it. Every once in a while I take a project that's a little bit beyond my scope and when I do it, I regret it and I'm stressed. When you bring on partners, you can extend your area of specialty. So maybe you're just a freelance designer, but you can tell your prospect, you know, my team. Well, I've got a team of developers, I've got an SEO expert on a team, I've got a good copywriter and that sounds a lot better than I just build small six-page websites. Obviously, you can now produce projects that are of a high level of expertise because now you've got specialists in there and so you can win bigger jobs and make more money and so that's what we're hoping today is that you get inspired to win more business. So we're going to show you, what we're going to do is walk through a life cycle of a project. So we'll go through estimating the job, designing the job, coding the job and then support after the job and we'll see how maybe with a little bit different thinking that you can bring on some experts. So, let's see. So, simple informational websites are pretty easy to do with a little bit of a WordPress background and finding the right theme and maybe a little bit of basic functionality. You know, you could build a six- or ten-page website with a blog for a local business and that may not be much of a challenge for you. As the business then says, well, I've got some real business issues that we'd like for you to solve on the website, then it becomes a little bit more of a challenge. So, if somebody approaches you and says, you know, you do websites, right? And we all say, yes, we do, of course. And can you do this, this, this and this? So the question is, you know, do you say, still say, you know, yes, we can and now I've got to go find somebody or, you know, tell me more. Find out a little bit more about what you're looking to accomplish, okay? So, the more complex business issues require a more thorough discovery process. Do you all use some sort of a discovery process when you take on a new client? A couple of heads nodding. And again, that process is, you know, tell me who you are, what you do, who you do it for, how you do it, what benefit or value does your client, you know, your customers receive. And so that's pretty good for informational sites. But if they ask about specific functionality, I want somebody to come to the site, become a registered user, download premium content, maybe pay, you know, now you've got different components that are part of this. And it's like, you know, I think I can do it. I went to WordCamp, they listed a bunch of plugins, but sometimes they don't all come together real nicely. So, the idea is to ask more questions and clarify their responses. So, you know, how many members are you looking to sign up? What's sort of a timeframe? How much are you charging? And just try to ask more questions. And like the slide says, like a four-year-old child, why? Why do you want to add this component? Why, you know, is that going to be beneficial for you? A lot of times we get business issues that are thrown at us, and when we ask the prospect, you know, some of these questions, they realize that maybe they're asking us to build something that might cost a couple thousand dollars and that it may only benefit or find them one or two or three customers. Or they realize, you know what, nobody's actually going to go through this process, and so maybe we should scrap that or find a different way of doing it. So, it's really important to have a discovery process, ask more questions, clarify those responses, keep digging deeper and deeper. And when you're asking questions, they're talking, and the one who talks least in these situations usually wins, right? We go into a business selling situation, and all we're doing is talking about us and the great services we provide, the number of customers and blah, blah, blah. We haven't given them enough chance to speak, and the next one, the person that comes in, your competition that asks more questions is probably likely to get the job. So, Rhonda, why don't you just hear a couple of case studies? Like I said, we have worked with some agencies and designers in the Atlanta area, and just give us a couple of examples of some case studies where we've made those agencies money. First, the five examples I'm going to go over for the agency themselves and they would have turned down probably all of these jobs or not even told that we can't do this, we're going to give this to somebody else, or we know somebody that'll do this. These five examples netted these agencies total about $120,000. So they would have walked away in total about that much money. The first one is a custom design. Many times as developers, I don't want to, as a developer, do not want to hinder a graphic designer at all in their creativity. But sometimes the user experience when they come to a page or things like that need to be tweaked. In one example, I was talking about another project to a graphic design agency and they said, hey, we're putting together an estimate and we're in discussions with this company and they want all of these custom mobile designs. So when one of their sales people go, they want a different design than the website and this and this, and that should be no problem. I'm like, let me look at your designs. By the time we got done looking at the designs and re-estimating it, they ended up, before they submitted it to the prospect, doubling the estimate. Because of the amount of work, they probably would have lost or had to go back and have kind of like a bad face to the client like, how do I eat this cost? Because it was that much custom work just to get the site to display differently on a tablet versus mobile versus all the other devices because they were very mobile-centric. Data integration. Actually, we watched this project two weeks ago. A graphic design agency had somebody just pop in one day say, we want a WordPress website, but it has to hook to two of our Microsoft SQL databases housed at a different location. And it has to be real-time. She calls me and says, what's Microsoft SQL and can you get over here as quick as possible and can we talk to this client? This project by itself was probably the biggest one of these and that was over a $35,000 project by the time we were done. Business processes. Bill alluded to this a little bit earlier. Many times a client, when they come in or a prospect comes in, they kind of know what they want in the end, but they don't know how to get there. And in one case, a client came and they said, we have sales reps, we have wholesalers, we have regular customers, and we want different processes in an e-commerce solution for everything. As we started talking to them, we realized the sales reps was kind of new. They didn't even know internally what the data flow, what the business flow of that was. So I actually, as probably the developer, the business analyst, went in and met with different people in the company and put together a business flow, put together a design flow, actually came up with every plug-in we're going to use, went over it with them. And again, it doubled the estimate what the graphic designer thought it was going to be based on the time we were done. They were so bought into the client. They're right now onto their third website with this graphic designer because they were so impressed with the thoroughness of the project. The custom features. We've had many times when, can you just do this? Can you just do that? Can we just add this field? Can we just add that field? We're having a thorough discovery process up front. We uncover all of that. So again, it's in the estimate that you're not going back. I don't know if you have any clients that feel like sometimes or they'll tell you they feel like they're being nickled and dimed or you feel like you're losing money because they're asking for things and you don't know how to go back. By having the thorough discovery process up front with somebody that's kind of into the code, you can stop some of that. And the last one, automated processes. We had a client that had nightly feeds coming in and they wanted them to integrate at certain time frames into WordPress. The graphic designer had no clue what she was even talking about. Came in, talked with her. It was actually a very simple project of these five. This was the smallest, but it meant the most to the client because they already had two other websites with this graphic designer and this was just the third one. And just again, it solidified the relationship. The last thing the designer wanted that person to do is go find another person to do it because that other business could eventually be in jeopardy, if that makes sense. You have a question? Many times I will go in just, I'm Rhonda. They don't know what company I'm with. Sometimes they know me just because where we live and some of the graphic designers, I've worked with them enough. Many times I, even though I'm technically a subcontractor for that graphic designer, the client doesn't care. They have bills through the graphic designer in probably 99% of the time. The client bills to the graphic. I still many times have direct communication with the client, especially when we're in the discovery process getting questions. But again, the communication is really important. They're copied on emails. We do voice conference calls, joint conference calls, things like that. So it's really never come up as a problem. Again, I come in for that graphic designer. Does that make sense? Does that answer? But even the design works. Our website lists our services and one of those is graphic design. I mentioned the logo work that I do. If somebody's got a couple hundred dollars in their budget and, right? So yeah, you're insulted, right? Because a true designer understands the process and the worth of a rebrand or a good logo is in a thousand, two thousand and up range, right? So if they say, we want you to do a website and then we look at their collateral and we look at their branding and we go, this is going to be, you know, have you thought about doing this? If they have nothing else in their budget, you know, do you mind if I just create something and put it up there because we're going to build a brand new website with a really bad logo? So we provide those services but the, you know, the percentage of our business that is that is really small work. We're actually considering removing that because of just the partnership that we have. We've got a team of graphic designers that, when a project comes in that is, now they do have a budget for it, then we'll bring in a designer and say, you know, here's one that is beyond our scope and they're going to need logo branding, you know, creative posters, flyers, presentation folders, that type of thing and we'll do the website part of it. So how's our community doodle coming along? What do we got here? We just got here. Keep it going. It'll be interesting to see what we end up with. All right, so somebody approaches you with one of these scenarios that Rhonda mentioned that perhaps is beyond your core competency but you'd really like to get the job and so how do you handle this from a business perspective? So the first thing is, of course, the estimate. Now, if it's possible to bring in a technical expert into your meeting, then that's fine. With our arrangements, in some cases she's got a business card from a couple of our agencies and they just say, Rhonda's a part of our team and she hands them the agency's business card. Sometimes the work is just a referral where a graphic designer is just saying, these guys need a website, just take it. Other times, the designer's going to manage the project, probably bill for project management. If there's a difference in fees, they may take a margin over the top. The billing, they may decide, well, I-360 Group's going to bill you or your technical partner's going to bill you or billing may go through the designer. So you get to determine the terms that you want to set up when you're working with a partner like that. And one of the big things on this is, remember, the estimate, I call it, there's a couple of different estimates. If you're working with a developer or a development agency, you need to get a firm written estimate with, and I'll go over it in detail in a minute, from your developer that then you, if you're a graphic designer, will then translate and put into your estimate for the client. You want everything in writing, everything. And that includes, you need to give your developer a full site map as much as possible. This is where you may need to get your developer to talk to your prospect. If it's an e-commerce, you need to know approximately how many products. And some of you may know. Adding 10 products versus a client coming back and saying there's 200 products takes a little bit different time. Knowing if it's e-commerce again, knowing what attributes, what are their color choices, how many categories are we talking, other features they want to add to it. Creating a mock wireframe and showing it to your developer. So they kind of get in their mind, are there any gotchas? They may not be the greatest creative people, but we can look at it and understand the flow of it. Again, I mentioned mobile before. Mobile is so hot right now. Responsive, adaptive, everything else. Looking at it, deciding, are we going to do more adaptive images? Are we going to do more responsive images? Are there any gotchas that the client's expecting on a mobile platform? Like the case example I gave with the sales reps. What type of tablets are they using right now? How are we going to make sure that they get the right information first? When I do an estimate, I list the exact plug-ins, the cost of the plug-in and what it's going to take for me to or my team to customize it. And sometimes I'll give different examples. And I have graphic designers that give those to the client because many times the client is also visual and showing them a plug-in or a demo of a plug-in, many times the client will say, that's what I said, but it's really not the functionality I wanted. I want this. And it may be close enough that now you have to add on custom changes to that plug-in. But again, in the estimate, I'll even say in e-commerce, we do not know, you know, exclusions, we do not know what merchant is being used so there may be additional charges for this. Again, so as the graphic designer, you're telling the prospect, ha ha, there may be some more pricing coming. So they're not, again, you don't want to surprise them with a bill or here's two more hundred dollars you need to spend on this website and they're looking at you again, thinking you're nickeling and diming them. Up front, I like to find out what hosting they're using. You've probably heard this preached enough around here. Hosting does matter. Where is their DNS? Where are we setting up the development environment if they have a current production site? Because wherever we set that up, we need to make sure SCF is turned off so the search engines don't index it while it's being developed, et cetera. The client many times, we let the client browse the site as it's being developed when it gets to a certain point. And also email. The most successful project will seem like it's a failure if the day you watch, they lose email. That is all they will remember. So knowing if they're on an exchange server or are they using Microsoft Office 365 email or what they're using, because you may have to stage your go live date so that maybe email and the website goes live over a weekend so they have least amount of downages. But knowing that up front so that they can gather logins and passwords and stuff like that is critical. Again, Bill mentioned project management. We usually add a project management in there and you need to let your developer know, are you coming to meetings with me? How many weekly meetings are we having? We're having a conference call. You're coming on site for three meetings because they may charge for that. Phone calls. And all of a sudden you get a bill because they charge for going on site to meetings and you don't know that. So again, setting the stage up front and get that from the developer, what's included, what's not. And again, scope of work exclusions and change orders. Have a change order process. Even if the developer says, I don't want to cost you anymore, get it in writing. Get it in writing so that you can keep track of it as a developer, or I mean as a graphic designer. They can keep track of it and you can also flow the work. Get it as quickly as possible if the client asks for something. Get it as quick as possible to the developer to find out, is it going to cost more? What's it going to change? Because it may impact and have a cascading effect on other things being developed. Any questions on there? Anything so far? So the role that you've stepped into at this point is kind of like a general contractor. So you've found a prospect, gained their trust and now you're going to manage that prospect. You're soon to be new client or customer and the technical person on the other end. So if the client changes and says, we said it was going to be a 10-page site but as I think about it now we've got to add four more pages and oh it's just four more pages, right? I mean that doesn't take any time. Or the plugin issue, oh I didn't know it was going to look like that. So it's important. Soap of work, exclusions, change orders. You know change orders. Well there's always going to be changes, right? Even if they lay out in a site map 32-page site do you think when it's finished it's going to be a 32-page site? It might be a 27-page site because you look at it and they make changes. So having this discussion with your client up front then when it does happen then they're a little bit more prepared for it. And when we say in writing you know that's the term contract. Well, I mean contract almost seems like we're already at war with one another but it's really an agreement so we refer to these as our standard agreement and it simply says you know if you're a designer and you're hiring us and you want us to build a 10-page site and here's the images and here's all this information then that's what we're going to do. And if we don't do it and we said we were going to do it then there's a penalty on our end if we build 10 pages and you say well I really wanted you to do 20 then there's a little bit of a discussion there but the agreement is a piece of paper. Not the phone call conversation we had not the tweets going back and forth and so just use that as an agreement. There's enough horror stories out there I'm sure you've heard of developers leaving, moving on, disappearing and this kind of helps that. This gives that in writing you know where they're at it gives you something to come back on and again everything in writing. A couple of notes here so site map we use something called slick plan and with slick plan you can create a site map and it's a visual display and you can show that to the client and they'll show the hierarchy of menus and your content structure and then when they approve that it actually converts that into pages and There's a plugin called slick plan you plug in that to your site import it in and you can actually put default content in it and it will build your pages for you automatically. In the old days I did add new page new content goes here put that on every page and then build my menus and add new menu add new menu and so slick plan it builds the menus and the pages for you show them a nice it's a visual representation of your site plan but then it converts all that stuff into menu items and content so really cool wire framing so do you guys do any wire framing tools called balsamic and gliffy a lot of graphic designers like to use illustrator what other tools is anybody using for creating wireframes which one do you know do we know what wireframes are so wireframes are just simple line diagrams that say I'm going to have a homepage slider a little navigation bar boxes on my right sidebar a footer that kind of thing and they get a feel for that and say okay I get the general layout of what we're going to do so project handoff we've congratulations we've won the job alright so you're excited and nervous all at the same time and now you're going to be working with your technical support partner so ronda why don't you go through these again show the design right before you send it to the client right before you send it make sure there's no gotchas before it gets final approval monitor the deliverable date monitor the deliverable dates remember many times your technical support person is a subcontractor they may have other projects they're working on things like that they need to know if they're backing into a date what the deliverables are respecting things when the next project meeting is set a calendar create even if you have to a google calendar or something like that so that you're both on the same page walk through walk through your support person through your photoshop I have three of the graphic designers we work with actually take each photoshop and create jpegs of those and we walk through and we print them off and in some cases meet and go over any little intricacies that I need to know that I need to get my team it may be as simple as see the spacing between here the client loves how it flows here just so we're aware of anything in communication you've had privately with the clients it gets it back to us in the right hand and sometimes I have one design agency that actually puts a dev layer a notes layer on each photoshop with arrows to certain things so that we're well aware of things that we can turn on and off most of you probably are aware of this but google fonts we had one agency where we kind of had to go through a learning curve on that they were giving us fonts that were either mac based or they weren't google font based that weren't going to work on the web relatively easy so they had to go back and find google fonts and the google font will show properly on a pc on a mac and many times if you're using something let's say for a poster you could pick a beautiful font but it's not going to show on a web all the time then we can get it is if we encapsulate that into an image and again that takes away from the SEO part of the website by having text in images and again provide an access to all source files images, page copy, notes anything images separately if you have different layouts if you're doing adaptive images make sure you create your images very large aspect ratio you want for the other layouts for mobile and things like that you can use Dropbox, you can use Google Drive any other way you may have a private FTP available with some way that you can communicate and get those because many times those photoshop files as you know are very large and they don't send nicely through email so having a nice communication method like that either one of those works again long as you're on the same page it doesn't matter what it is long as you're in communication with your developers and you can communicate back and forth and if you do update something in Dropbox or in one of these drives make sure you tell them hey I just updated the About Us page I noticed a typo on it let them know because they might not be looking at the dates because they're heavy and decoding over here so just send them an email or give them a call so so our project is progressing we've won the job we're now dumping all this stuff to the technical support person we're going through things in great detail and now they're going to go off and do their work and obviously again as a general contractor communications as a project manager communications is critical if you choose to use some sort of CRM or project management system that can be handy you can set up a calendar an ID for your technical support person to access different project files base camp is pretty popular among the design community but some sort of online method where you can communicate email is not the best way to communicate it works but attaching files and making markups to designs and iterations and things not the best conference calls so typically in a project there's a lot of communication up front and then it spreads out a little bit and spreads out further toward the end so conference calls if you're going to use a free conference call or just some sort of three-way calling best to set up a set date and time especially at the beginning you just say how about for the next month every Tuesday at 3 p.m. we'll have a 15 minute or half an hour whatever it takes conference call it may include the client or it may just be with the technical person and all of them but that's important so that as it's being developed you're sort of showing them this is the direction we're heading and the client is going okay I see where you're going you don't want to build something and say here it is and they go oh that's not what I wanted email and you know it works but it's not the best screen sharing so team viewer go to meeting those kind of services again maybe you do that with the conference call round dimension file sharing so some sort of drop box google drive somewhere where files can be dumped and you can communicate back and forth maybe you even need to fill out a time sheet depending on your arrangement with your developer so communication is very important alright so we've been developing the site it looks great it functions great now we're going to go ahead and launch the site and Rhonda want you to do it I mentioned about picking the proper date I mentioned it earlier normally the biggest well number one you need to get client approval that's probably the biggest thing but the other thing is scheduling it around if you have email issues if they're not using exchange server or some separate email if they're hosting is tied to their email that is the kind of question and the gotcha on that you may need to schedule it again on the weekend so that they don't have any downages so that you can get them new outlook parameters in box out box settings and things like that that's probably the biggest again on the picking the proper date launch on a weekend be ready on Monday morning be ready to take some calls and just be ready because change has now occurred and even if everything is perfect actually be ready on the weekend and backing up the current site you want to back up the current site that's if they have a live production site back it up for them so that they have it many times they don't know how to do that so you're overlaying it and the last thing you want is them to say no we need to roll back there's major issues and you don't have the backup because you've deleted it back it up I usually zip it up and send it to the client then we put the new site in so one of the things we started doing too we got a like a 21 point checklist we want to make sure when we launch a site that everything is being handled we do a before and after screenshot so we like to show the really bad ugly site and then what we've done a new one that is pristine and perfect before the client has gone in and started it's great for our portfolios before they go in and start making changes to it and then you don't want to show it anymore on your portfolio if any of you have had that happen again hosting hosting is critical you want to set the stage up front but you may need to move them to a new host you'll hear many times around here today hosting matters a lot so it depends on where you're at you're using managed hosting etc email you need to set up email for them do you even want to touch email you may tell them to go to Microsoft 365 or do something else because you don't want to get into the email game and I know many people that are now kind of moving toward that direction and name servers do they even know where they bought their domain from 10 years ago do they have the user names and passwords that's why it's critical up front that you set the stage that they need to get those username and passwords because you're going to need access to to reset the domain server or reset the a record or the mx record if you know what I'm talking about there to get the website live we've had websites held up for a couple weeks because the user can't figure out how to get that username and password because now they're on a trip so you want to have that up front you want to kind of nag them a little bit to make sure you get it and you actually what they send you try it to make sure usually as a developer I try it because it's surprising how many times the username and password they send me don't work the last thing you want to do is have them send it to you two weeks earlier you sit on it the day you're going live you try it and you realize it doesn't work try it the day they send it to you so you can get back to them nope that didn't work can you try it again oh sorry I pulled one out of an old file you realize they never even went and found the new one sometimes the name server we're just pointing the a record to a new web host and the mx or email record is staying at the existing server those I like those are issues alright so we've launched the site yay now it's post launch time our work is not done so if you're doing this on a weekend then you got to spend some time and some of this stuff takes a little bit of time so Rhonda why don't you go on are you familiar with what 301 redirects are I find it's usually technical support people forget it what it means is when you launch a new site your page names change it may be the old site may be about us.html and now with wordpress with permalinks it's now about us Google doesn't know about us HTML equals about us so you have to tell them what's called 301 redirects there's some wonderful plugins ones called I think 301 redirect that I really like and what I usually do is before the site launches I do if you go to Google any of the search engines and you type in site colon and then the domain name it's going to tell you everything Google has indexed for that site I print those pages off because once I launch the new site I don't have access to that anymore or I scrape it down and get all the URLs and then what I do is I take all those old URLs that Google has found and I map them to the new page names 301 redirect and that kind of goes along with it we set up analytics, Google analytics and we create an XML sitemap but it's a dynamic XML sitemap we don't use the Google XML sitemap because then when you add a page I see this a lot with sites we take over they'll use the Google sitemap and then when you add a page it doesn't show them because they created this at time of launch but there are some great sitemap plugins out there Yoast has one it's a Google XML I think it's called that I like a lot and it dynamically creates it then you can use it to use for webmaster tools are you guys familiar with what webmaster tools is it kind of helps you maintain the health of your site they'll send you alerts when some updates are needed or if you've been hacked they'll send you that or if you've been blacklisted they'll give you indications sometimes before the client even knows it it's very simple to set up you don't want to set those up before you launch because then Google may start indexing your site before you want to and they won't find the site out there if you haven't moved it out there and everybody talks about Google and it's 80% of all search traffic but Bing's got webmaster tools and Yahoo's got webmaster tools and so we don't ignore that in some industries and some target markets perform really well in Yahoo or Bing so XML sitemap is the same way you submit to Bing and Yahoo they've got their process and they also have webmaster tools and I find normally Bing and Yahoo will index faster than Google and then set up a backup process and make sure the backup you're running is not found on your web server we deal with a lot of people that get hacks which we'll talk about in a little bit but what we usually find out when we look at the dates and the logs is somebody that hacks the site before and infect the backups go back out won't touch the site come in a couple days later and infect the site so that when you call your hosting company and say hey I've been hacked they restore one of the backups on the server and what they're doing is installing a different hack so you're still hacked so what you want to do is set up and there's many utilities out there set up a backup process that actually downloads the files externally off of the web server so that you have a good clean copy all of them will even do iterations that you can keep 7 or 8 copies of those because it may take a couple days before you realize that your client site's been hacked and then you at least have a couple iterations to go back to and restore and also training when we launch a project we train the graphic designers on how to update the site they may not want to many times they don't want to touch it they want us to do any changes we train them so that they're aware of things and then we also train the client and that training may vary depending on what the client wants to update or not update but the training is very critical in just keeping them abreast of what they bought and what is the full development it gives them a breath of what's been developed okay so now we've completely launched the site congratulations and now we can get paid depending on how your agreement is set with your client and perhaps you can pay your technical support person as well but our work is not done because it's not a static world it's a dynamic world and so there are always going to be technical issues and I don't know if it's happened to you but let's say it's a Tuesday afternoon 3 o'clock you've got Photoshop and Illustrator running, you're creating a beautiful design you're in the mood you've got music cranking and the phone rings and somebody says my site is down or my site's been hacked so now it's like now what do I do? I don't want to deal with that if you're like a lot of designers we know it's like I never want to take those calls so they're going to happen technical issues are going to happen and we'll talk about the different types but again when you're selling the service anticipate they're going to happen let the client know you're going to need some sort of support and maintenance and so sell them support and maintenance the difference is maintenance is backups and patches and plugins and keeping the site running support is answering their questions if they want you to do their blog posts or they want you to do their updates then put them on some sort of schedule is it on demand or are you going to do 2 hours a month, 5 hours a month, 10 hours a month something like that but have that conversation and sell that up front if you don't want to do support and your technical partner is better suited to that then you can have them do that and maybe still make a little bit of a monthly margin on that or project management fee on that and then when we do have a problem there's a triage process and so we've got to quickly the first thing is restore the site ASAP somebody's business is at stake, their reputation is at stake restore that site as soon as possible then we'll investigate you know it's down, we've got it back up we're looking into it right now to try to figure out what it is and then we'll try to repair it so sometimes we investigate it and we repair it and this is when we see wait a minute it's broken again and somebody's written a pretty clever script but that's we want to keep the site up and running as soon as possible and tighten it up as soon as we can and then investigate it and repair it so the types of technical issues Rhonda just quickly software plug-in conflicts are probably the most critical that is more of the white screen of death you may have seen and read about outside of tax that's tax, hate to say that but it's tax, it's going to happen plan on it, they are searching they are looking it doesn't matter the size of your site internal human error they delete a page they I had somebody delete all the pages one time on their site and tell them ask me why you never know what's going to happen there hardware server issues that's less problematic but it can happen where you need to restart a server or an update happened on the server and something's not working right so I can give lots of examples over beer for that if you want so how to bring in outside health as we stated in this scenario you're like a general contractor and again with some of the examples that Rhonda gave the designers were able to get substantially more business by using this sort of method find somebody that's going to match your personality business model if you're a Monday through Friday 9 to 5 then it might make sense to have a developer that's a Monday through Friday 9 to 5 if you're I'm working at 2 o'clock in the morning and I need to talk to my developer at 2 o'clock in the morning sometimes in the morning but you've got to if they don't want to take those calls it's not the way they work there's going to be friction so you need to find out personality we have tried so we've been doing this 16 years we have tried offshoring and it has never worked for us we've tried different countries and it just has not worked it's a better experience the people that we use are all USA based and the problems that we have is the work that gets done is only what they've been asked to do and it doesn't work in a workflow or a process and it's just been a problem for us so our business model is we're going to work with people that we can communicate with and have a relationship with the business arrangements we touched on it a little bit but make those agreements contracts if you will have a contract with your developer as well as with your client one of our first contracts was a friend who was an attorney and she worked for Georgia Pacific and she gave us a 13 page contract and I said I am not going to go to a local landscape company as a client and she gave us a contract when all he wants is a handshake I'm going to do a little bit more than a handshake so we ended up having to create a small contract a medium one and a large one I don't think we've ever used the Georgia Pacific one and she charged us a lot for it so but make sure that the essential information is in there you don't have to get into great detail on that but just an understanding look this is what you said you were going to do and on the contracts you may want to have a general contract and then every year do an update to that contract arrangements change their pricing model may change things like that so doing an addendum to that contract every year is also really helpful because you may find things during that year that didn't work that you want to put into that contract and then the developer may also have some questions and some changes financial arrangements you may be comfortable getting paid at the end of the job but your technical person may want to get paid every week or at the end of the month or a third upfront or 50-50 or something like that so again just lay those out have that discussion and they're different so we've got some designers and agencies and we've got different arrangements one of them that gives us a lot of business but the arrangement is not necessarily in our favor we've got to wait to get paid and that means we're paying money out to anybody that we're bringing in to work on a project and also find out when work will begin some developers will not begin work until they have the check in hand others will begin by because the relationships there they'll begin knowing that the check is going to be here within the end of the week again your deadlines may be impacted by this so you want to make sure up front that your work going to begin get that verbally from them if not in writing oh I'm waiting for the check that's the last thing you want to hear and you're going on vacation and haven't had time to send it and now the project is two weeks delayed electronic payments work great and then turn around time set those deadlines if if there's an issue that needs to be done does that mean that you stop what you're doing or is your normal turn around time 72 hours no client ever wants to hear we'll get that in 72 hours unless they didn't buy a support package that allowed them a quicker turnaround so in some of our support packages we stay you know and emergencies get handled right away the site goes down we're on it we will drop everything but for can you add a page or do something if there's nothing else going on or if it's something quick we'll go ahead and do it but not everybody jumps to the top the ones that are the best clients and pay the best jump to the top so they're going to get a quicker turnaround time make sure you negotiate that with your technical support partner so my hope is that you begun to think a little bit about more than just being a graphic designer that you could be a contractor that you could maybe take bigger projects that are a little bit outside your poor competency if you had the right technical partner and in doing so maybe you can build an agency or build a larger agency or just take on a little bit bigger projects but basically make more money have more fun have less stress do we have any questions we still got a little bit of time for questions usually I'll use right now we're looking at evaluating this but many times many of our clients have Dropbox Premium Edition so they have quite a bit of space out there so we'll buy a plugin called Dropbox Backup if I can say it properly and it's only like about 20 bucks and you can do up to 7 iterations and you can also get an email notifying you that the backup happened successfully or if it had a problem there's also another one similarly out there for Google Drive clients like that because it goes on their Dropbox they give me access to their credentials to their Dropbox and if I ever need to get it I can they feel a little bit more in control that they have the files if something happens they don't know what to do with them anyway in all honesty and it backs up the database as well but they get backup buddy but they feel in control because it's in their name it's a little bit of comfort for them there's something that they have of the website Code Guard has been a sponsor at some of the WordCamps and some of the Meetups and then even some of the managed dashboards and managed utilities so we can look at a number of sites and we can allow so we're going to manage those and we can allow our designers to take a peek and also a lot of times they're not interested but they just want the sites up and everything is going but we'll give them access to it along that same regard I usually train the end users and the graphic design agencies under some circumstances not to click update unless we make sure we have a successful backup because that's when the things happen I just went in and clicked five updates and one of them is not compatible right now with a release that happened or we've done customizations to that theme and it's under support and we've told them five times so we've even gone in from the code and turned off updates in some cases so they don't see it which I don't normally recommend but there are certain times it's critical because you're getting a phone call every three days that the site's down because you're waiting for that plugin to create the next update any other questions? where's our community doodle let's see what that looks like oh we've got a stream and some trees we've got a checkerboard we've got people growing into flowers beautiful we've got little birds we've got a whole forest a rocket ship pretty awesome that's what happens when the community contributes somebody's really good at drawing rockets somebody's really good at drawing forests and that's what you get this will be your next website that your next project I want it to look like this let me just put our information up on the screen that's our website i360group.com we put a link on the homepage of our site up in one of the top navigation bars that says WordCamp Asheville and so the power points there if you have any questions at all at this point or just going forward ongoing email us give us a call we are happy to encourage you to take the next step and maybe say yes to one of those projects that in the past you said I'm not quite comfortable so with that we're done alright thank you for coming