 I'm Donna Boddy, and I live in the Philadelphia area here, and I own a digital market. We develop WordPress, help our customers with digital marketing, plans, strategies, and execution. And we're here today to talk about managing your WordPress projects. I've had my business for a long time. I started it when I was back working in a corporate, very large corporate organization. And one of the things I found, this was in the IT area, every time there was a cool new technology or some kind of new development, the first reaction was always, oh, we should get a vendor in to do a proof of concept and do that. And I started thinking to myself, you know, I'm on the wrong side of the table here. I want to be working with all the cool new projects, not the fires on all the legacy projects. And that's one of the main reasons that I started my business. So why did you start your business? Was it a passion, something you really felt like you wanted to do, looking for that independent flexibility in your lifestyle? Maybe it was forced on you because you were laid off somewhere and there wasn't any other place. And no matter what, you understand that you have choices about how you structure your business so that you can have the life you want, whether that's building a world class, you know, a big organization or making sure that you have enough time to have your, meet your kids from the bus at the same time you have a fulfilling, interesting career. So as business owners, though, we have a lot of challenges, right? Time, does anyone feel like they have enough time to do everything they want to do? It doesn't work that way. Money, right? If we only had more money, you know, when I left it, starting on my own business and, oh my God, there's a problem with the printer and I was like, wait, I have to figure out how to fix it or find someone to call. Or, oh, and I have to pay money out of my own pocket on having that service. So, you know, there's always the money challenges. There's the balance challenges, right, between your work and your life. It's really exciting when you have a business, but it can also be consuming. We have other things that are happening in our lives. There's a lot of work work and sometimes there's a lot of life life and just overload. I have to tell you, in one of those weeks right now, somehow I managed to book free speaking engagements this week and this is my third one and I'm like never doing that again. But they've organized and done a while ago and then children called this week, you know, mom, I'm in an ambulance on the way to the ER. He injured his knee playing football and so there's just, you know, sometimes life stops us from doing work, right, and work does. And we have to wear many hats, right. You need to be the receptionist, the IT person. You need to understand about accounting and insurance, things like that, right. You know, you may be the goat, but not all those hats are really comfortable. We don't like to have to do all of these different things. So, you know, sometimes that hat doesn't fit right and sometimes that's a good thing because it means we're going to learn something and we're going to grow and we're going to stretch ourselves. But other times it just means there's a better use of our time and somebody else ought to be doing this. So, when we have our business, we have our challenges, but we have our goals, right. We want to provide great value and have happy customers. Why do we want that? Because our business is not sustainable if we don't have customers that like us and want to do business with us again or refer us to our friends. It's important also that when you have this business that you have time to focus on what's important to you, whatever that may be. Whether it's the growth of your organization, that personal time, the development of skills, understand what's important to you, and of course we need to make a profit. Because if we're going through this and spending all the time and all the effort and you're not making any money at it, that's stressful. So, given that, I'm going to talk today about some high-level tips. We don't have a whole lot of time here on managing your WordPress projects. What is it that you should do? But if I could sum up and give you a preview of really what I'm going to be talking about, the big picture is this. Stop treating every project you get as a brand new thing that you have to do. You need to focus and think about what are the things that are repeatable from project to project? How can I save time? How can I be more efficient at what I'm doing so that I don't have to always be behind in my things? When you price your projects, you can price per hour for yourself and figure out what you need to make per hour. You can charge your client an hourly thing or you can charge your client a fixed thing and figure it's going to take you so much. If you could give the same or better results in half the time, that's a win for you, it's also a win for your customers. If you don't do that, it's just too much work and you're not going to make enough money. Then you're not going to be happy and then you're not going to have your business. What should you do instead? What we should be doing is these things, and these are what I'm going to talk about. Develop systems and processes for your projects. This is an important one. Manage your customers. Organize your work, pick your partners, and don't forget you have to keep your business running. One of those hats is always like billing the customers, right? Don't forget about that part of it. We don't like to do that. Then you must keep learning because if you're in this industry and you don't like change, you're always going to be beating your head against the wall. I'm not really touching at all on the sales and marketing aspect of your business. That's a whole other hat that you or someone else in your organization must wear, but one of the things that I see even with some of our small business and marketing customers is no amount of sales and marketing is going to fix execution that's not done right. You have to be able to deliver and deliver it well in order for those marketing efforts to actually work and give you fruit. It's not sustainable. You can get maybe a lot of one-off customers with great sales, but you can't necessarily, they're not going to come back to you again if you don't actually deliver what you say you're going to deliver. So let's talk about systems and processes. When you do a project, a new website, everyone might seem new, but what is common and what is unique to every single project? What you want to do is have processes and systems for repeatable tasks so that you don't have to keep making the same decisions over and over again. Building a website has a lot of moving parts, right? You've got to set up a development environment or staging site, there's graphic work, there's design work, there's CSS work. What kind of theme are we going to use? What kind of functionality does this client want? What plugins are we going to use on site? Do we have the customer's DNS access? Did we get their logos yet? Do they have a color scheme? What are their social media links? Where should the forms go to that they want to have in their thing? There's a myriad of details. How are you keeping track of all of those things? Is there content that we need to know about? There's just a lot of stuff. We have a huge checklist in our organization. It has hundreds of things on it. You know that you're going to need Google Analytics. You know that you're going to need to know what email the form should go on. How much of this information can you get upfront from the client? What are all the steps that you do when you create a website from start to delivering it at the finish? If you start and take a look at that, we've done this within our organization multiple times and we're constantly refining it. How can we rearrange those steps so that we get it done faster? How can we go through and, you know, eliminate unneeded decisions? If we know that we need X, Y, and Z from the client before we start, let's get that ahead of time. That saves us time on the backend. And the other thing to think about as you're going through and developing these systems and processes, which parts do you hate or are you not good at or you don't like? As you start to expand your business, you can start to identify, oh, this part's a job for someone, or I need to get help in this area. So there's a lot of things that you want to figure out how you do stuff. What are you doing? I've lost my mouse. And I've lost the keyboard. And my son, who is with the ADL injury, is texting me five times in a row up here. There we go. So figure out how you do stuff. Look at it. Take the time, though, when you say, OK, look, this part's really a time suck. Can we do this more efficiently? Maybe if we did X before we did Y, we wouldn't have to go back and redo that part again. Take the time to write down stuff and develop processes and make decisions. If you know this is the best way to set up Yoast SEO, make it that way on every single one. Have it document it because then the next time you go to set it up, just check on your list. You have to notice something has changed, but it's not a brand new project every time. So also really important is to manage your customers. Set the expectations with them. Communicate the process. Clarify the scope. Get sign-offs and know your audience and provide guidance. Too many times, it's like what I said about the customers. If we know we need these three things before we have to start, let's make sure the customer knows, yes, we need a whole bunch of stuff from you, but we need these three things before you go. Make sure they understand the sign-off process. Make sure they understand the scope. Most importantly, about this providing guidance to them. They are coming to you to be an expert. So let me tell you what the surgeon was telling us with my son yesterday about ACL reconstruction. Apparently, you have your choice. You can take a tendon from the hamstring, a tendon from the knee, cadaver thing, and he's talking about all the different parameters around one, two, and three. After my son and I left, we're like, is he expecting us to decide which one is best for us? Or is that what we're telling him? But a lot of times with web development, we give our customers these options and we think we're explaining them really well, but they really don't have any context. They are coming to us because they don't know how to do this stuff. Don't ask them what color of the theme should be. If they have a set color scheme of all this stuff, they don't have any options. Let them get their feedback. But time and time again, when I'm talking to customers, they tell us this process is so much simpler. The last time we did a website, basically the developer came to us and said, well, what do you want? They don't know what they want. They are coming to you for guidance to tell them that. You have to learn enough about their business to understand what the right thing is, and ultimately it's their call. But an additional thing about guidance that's going to save you time and help your projects go away is when the customer sees something. I saw this thing and I think it'll be really great. Can we just have this here, here, and here? You know that you can do anything with enough time and money, right? But is it maintainable? Did you have to put some custom code in there that they're going to come and change something a little bit long? I always kind of bring it back to the budget. It's like, well, yes, you could do this. There's 27 fields of information from someone, but no one's going to fill out the form. What's your goal here? Don't be afraid to push back on the guidance with them. It's going to save your time. Who here feels like getting stuff from the customer is one of the hardest things about the process? Okay? So have a specific process in place on how you manage that. Here's your checklist of stuff. I need these, there's the priority. Give me number 20. That's fine if you give it to me ahead of time, but we're not doing anything until you give me one, two, three, four. That's your focus next week. Here you go. Now I need you to give me this, this, and this. They're coming to you because they don't know how to do it. And for them, it's all about the customer experience, right? How are you going to make it a good experience for your customer as well as deliver a good result? Who here uses Uber? Anybody? Okay. Why use Uber and not a cab company, right? Well, because I can get it on my app. I don't have to see where the driver is. It can be cheaper. It's easier to pay. Everything about the whole experience is so much more convenient and better for me as the consumer. Could the cab companies have done that? Yes, they could have. They could have. Did they? No. I was just talking to someone earlier this week to figure out on the West Coast for a conference and they're like at the airport and the yellow cabs are lined up from one end to the other and the line of people waiting for the Uber and Lyfts on the other side. Nobody was at the yellow cab. Could yellow cab have done that? Yes, they could have. So how is the experience you're giving your customers? How do you think about it? Take some time to actually think, is this easy for them? Is this good for them? How am I making it simple for them to do it? And then organize your work. I love checklists, right? You've done this stuff before. Maybe I haven't done this particular thing in three months. What did I decide was the best way to do it before? When you have checklists, you can train new people with it. It makes it so much simpler. How are you managing your customer passwords? Do you have a password manager? Don't be writing them all in the front of the file folder and they know I hired somebody to help me with this and they don't have access to it or we don't have it secure. Getting the customer passwords, right? Isn't that a challenge even at the beginning? You don't want to wait until you're at the end of the project to find out that the customer doesn't have access to their DNS to turn the live site on. It happens. Make sure you get that up front. You'll get paid faster, you'll be done the project faster, and they'll have the information. How are you going to organize your files? And I have this, we have a folder, we use Google Drive for everything, in from client, all that stuff. They just kind of randomly send you when they have all this information on the website. How are you organizing it so you can find it? Particularly in a case where, you know, they were going to get you something and then, oh wait, well we have something coming up so we're not going to get back to it to two months later. How do you remember where to find it? Billing. Set that up at the beginning. Know what's in the scope. Keep track of the changes that have happened that are outside the scope that you've talked with the customer and you remember that they get an invoice. Otherwise, 60 days later, you'll be like, oh wait, did we spend five hours on that additional thing? How much should we say we were going to build them? Track it at the beginning of what you're doing. And even think about your portfolio and promoting the project at the end. What is your wrap-up process on a project? Do you automatically say, okay, here's how we're going to promote it on our social media or add it to our website? Again, have a process in play so that when you do that, have a place for everything. So then another really important thing is picking your partners. How many people here work with a team? And how many people work? They do everything. You're all lying. Okay? Right at the top is WordPress. If you are developing WordPress sites, WordPress is actually a partner of yours. Depending on this tool to make money and build your business. Are they a good partner? Are you picking Gutenberg aside? What are you aware of where the direction they're going? When you start developing in WordPress, you can pick, if you like, a framework. Frameworks are like kind of between a theme and WordPress itself that add in a lot of functionality that you might be using again and again and again. So, for example, we use extensively the Genesis framework. And one of the features of Genesis is it's got built-in accessibility, if you turn that on. So if accessibility is important, we could build a theme and write all the accessibility in ourselves so that we could use someone like Genesis and their framework and do it. But it's important to pick these things correctly. You know, when we started doing WordPress projects, and this is probably seven or eight years ago, we had previous to that actually written a lot of content management systems for large corporate customers. And so we had a lot of criteria we were looking for. WordPress was really coming along with their robustness and stuff, and we found what we thought was a great framework. They were way ahead of the game. It was a fellow in Germany, and he had accessibility built-in, he had mobile responsiveness built-in, all these things that we were looking for that we would have had to build. Great. We love it. We built some sites with it. The guy, unfortunately, died very unexpectedly. And there were a few other people he was working with, but they couldn't pick up the development of it. And we were like, oh, wait, that's our... We've put our strategy on this. Maybe we got to rethink how we're picking things. Pick your tools, pick your frameworks. Pick your themes wisely. Don't go to a different theme vendor for every single project. If you've worked with a lot of themes, you can open up WordPress and realize, I feel like I'm in 10 different setups. Why do you want to learn that all over again? You can make things look however you want on the front end. But where is the theme that you've picked? Is the framework that you've picked? Are they following WordPress standards? Are they going to break when the Gutenberg thing comes out? Are they on top of that? Are they secure? Security is a huge thing today. Are they actively developing it? Do they have a community? So pick your themes and don't jump around every time to all these... Because you lose your efficiencies of scale. If you take some time and pick a good one to start with and understand that, you're going to save time on the second site, the third site. On the tenth site you do, you're going to fly. Because you know already what has to be done. Same thing with plugins, right? If you come to us as a customer, I don't care if you're a thousand-page site or a five-page site, you're getting gravity forms as your form plugin. Because there's things about... We like about it with the extensibility, the program. We pay for a developer license on it. Don't be afraid to pay to support those partners because they're going to save you headaches down the line. So when someone comes to us and says, well, I need a ninja form, well, why do you need a ninja form? We don't do that. The customer doesn't always know. And at least in my case, if it's that type of customer who says, this is exactly what I want. I want these plugins, this and this and this. I'm like, you're not my customer. We can't support you. Unless the cost now is five times what it was, but you have to know when to say no to people as well. And do you need that plugin? Right? I was just in the Gutenberg talk before this, and here was like, yeah, one line of code that turned Gutenberg on or off for certain post types, or hey, you can get this plugin that would do it. Well, do you need a plugin when it's one line of code? We do audits for people all the time. Google wants your site to load in under three seconds on a mobile device. Do you know how many audits we do where it takes 20 seconds to load the page? How is that person going to grow their business using that website if it's not fast and streamlined? So be judicious in the use of plugins. Same thing, develop relationships with, you know, can anybody be a designer, a graphic artist, a developer, a writer, an editor, a CSS wizard, right? Develop partnerships with people that you can rely on, that you can work together with because you'll all end up making more money. There's plenty of work out there, and then the WordPress community. This is a great event here today. Everything, you know, about the community and in the Philly area, you know, is awesome. There's great people, you know, help yourself, learn about stuff, get the things going. So, and then pick your workflow tools. How do you manage all this? You know, I have a short talk here and I don't have time to go into a lot of things, but there's, you know, Trello, different things. Our organization lives on Asana. It's a project management tool. Templates, checklists, Asana. Again, it's a great thing. So don't use Asana with most of the clients. We do shares, like some Google Sheets and stuff with them. Again, it depends on the client, but so many of them are overwhelmed by all of this stuff. We just try to keep it really simple for them. Here's what we need right now. Here's what you're going to sign off on next, like little chunks that they, you know, otherwise their heads start to explode, right? So intentionally pick good partners. And then keep your own business running, right? What are the technologies and tools that you're going to use? Are your computers backed up? Are they, you know, are you in danger of getting a ransomware virus? Because you didn't do something with it in losing all that development work that you have. Backups. What about how are you handling insurance and paying your bills and billing people and all kinds of other admins? And then knowing, are you making any money? So many people just kind of, I'm busy, I got some cash in the bank, but are your jobs profitable? You have to look at that. And that requires planning time. There's an expression, work on your business and not in your business. I have a customer and I strive to emulate her. I am not there yet, but she takes one week per quarter and calls it CEO week. And all she does is look at her business, okay, what tools do we need to do? Where are our plans for the next quarter? How are we going to grow our sales? Do we need to hire someone else, right? You have to sit and think about these things. And it's hard when you think, oh, I've got all this life going on and we have these projects that are due, but you'll never grow your business if you don't stop and take that time to do it. It is a little like herding cats, right? But we need to get them in their little boxes. And my last point is to keep learning. Gutenberg coming maybe faster than we think, right? These technology changes can be a challenge, but to be in this business, you have to adapt. You have to, I don't want to say grace change, I mean, because sometimes we just want things to work the way they did before, but you're not in control of all that. It's a process, things change, keep refining your processes. You know, I mentioned that checklist that we have on our thing and we have an interview system for customers when we start out. We have ripped apart that interview 10 times because we realize walking the customer through the information we need is one thing. But when you go to set up the system, you need it in all different order. We ended up with a sheet where we have the interview time, where we talk with them and go through the list. Then we have a setup tab that rearranges everything into the order that needs when you go to build the site so people have that. And then we have a documentation tab for where we're cleaning up and documenting all over, right? So you have to keep refining and improving. Especially on a day like today, we all like to snuggle up in our own world and just not do anything, but you have to adapt a learning mindset. And then finally, this is really important. You want to have fun. Find the joy in what you are doing because, you know, building the relationships and, you know, you start at your business not to be miserable. So how can you structure it so that you're doing more of the joyful parts? And where are the hats that you want? So that's my talk. And I do have, we have like five minutes for questions. There are any questions. And here's my contact information. So anybody have any questions? I know it's a lot of stuff. Yes. You mentioned the, I can't really, I apologize. The interview, client interview. Yes. Do you have a resource page or something? It depends on what you're doing for your customers. I do have some resource things like we do have a checklist because you're going to start off with, you know, where's your domain hosted? Is the DNS at the same place? Now, again, they're not even going to understand all this stuff half the time. So you have to kind of walk them through and explain to all that, you know. Is there a current site? Do you have access to the current site? Is it a new site? Is the old site content coming over? Yes or no? It's, you know, different sorts of things along that line. What are the social media platforms someone's using if you want to have social media icons on things, right? So we do have, probably not in a format that's like easily shareable, but I do have some documents on the, which I can put on my Twitter account later after I put the slides on there that have a lot of those basic questions that clients need to know, the checklist, if you will. You know, what email are they using? Where's your hosting at? Right? I kind of glossed over hosting, but hosting can be a huge time sucked in your projects if you're not doing that. Yes. Okay. Yeah. So the first question about how do you manage your time? It's, you know, obviously it's a challenge, right? I personally have been doing like time blocking and I like that. So like here, this challenge, like if I'm going to schedule customer meetings or something, I might say, all right, well, yeah, Tuesday afternoons, Wednesday afternoon, I'm going to book all those meetings. We're going to do meetings. Other times it might be like, okay, I need to do, you know, administrative stuff. Team meetings are going to happen on this day at this time. And then, you know, this time of the day is going to be blocked for, you know, the development work or whatever it might be. So trying to figure out how things actually, how much time things take, so that you know how much to block them out. And again, that's that process of are you, do you know what it takes to build a site and where could you then look at that process and streamline it? And as far as the second question, again, this is not the right answer for everyone, but we do provide managed service and support for all of the sites that we build. So when someone, in order to be able to do that efficiently and to manage it efficiently, I can't support like the gravity forms and the ninja forms and some other form, contact form seven and all of this other stuff. So if you want my cost-effective solution, I am more about how come to me with your business goals and what you're trying to achieve and I'm going to recommend that we do that. When people get all, how do I want to say, when they get all like in the micro details of things that ultimately aren't going to move the needle on their site, I like to say, I'm not really interested in working with you. You're going to go through and have, oh, well, can we move this six pixels over here or this or that? I'm like, look at it on a mobile phone. That's where 80% of your traffic is right now. Stop stressing about that or your budget is not 25,000 a year for the website. You're a non-profit with a budget of $1,000 a month for this. You cannot do it for the time that you want to do it. Does that answer your question and make sense? It depends on that. Some clients are not profitable is what it comes down to. Can you identify that and put up your warning signs? When we do marketing, we tell people to attract your ideal customer. You don't have to try to attract those customers that are a problem. You're going to get them anyway, but don't try to attract them. If we have time for one more question, we try to have some standardization, but honestly it depends on the customer. I learned this in working in the corporate world and working for a lot of large corporate clients. If I'm going to work with you and you know exactly what you want and that's fine and we're going to build it for us and you let us just build it, maybe I can build that site for you in, I'm just throwing numbers at 100 hours. But if you have a committee of 10 people that have to sign off and don't get us the stuff and change things around and have some custom requirement on hosting or something that we know that hosting company it's been a problem and stuff, that same exact deliverable might take 500 hours. So I can't price it exactly the same or I won't make money. Is that a fair answer? Okay, so I know people want to go to lunch. Thank you very much and I hope you picked up a couple tips.