 I am a freelance developer and like every other, a lot of WordPress developers got their start kind of bootstrapping their skills and business, learning on their own. I don't have a degree in software engineering and I've learned as I go along. Yes, I've taken courses. I've done a lot of client work and learned along the way. And I'm continually learning and I really enjoy learning, but I find it very difficult to communicate my value as a developer. It's a bit different than perhaps a designer, you know, with a nice portfolio, beautiful pictures, something that you can easily wow and woo a client. But how do you communicate the value of your code as a developer? How do you communicate? Hey, I'm the one you want to hire as opposed to that person over there. And so I want to try to keep this kind of brief because it is two o'clock on Sunday and it's hot in here. But I'd also like to hear from your perspectives as well if you have any and you want to contribute. So I'd like to tell you a story of the devalued developer. And so this happened to me years and years ago. I was pretty proficient in my skills working with WordPress. Comfortable in PHP, comfortable, you know, writing a plug-in, you know, custom themes. Pretty excited about that stuff. I had a client I was really excited about and we had some problems with their site. I, you know, opened up the theme obviously and as a developer I'm like, oh my gosh, you know, they're not doing anything the WordPress way. They're not doing anything like and queuing their scripts correctly. Maybe there's some hard coded menus in there, the kind of stuff that you see that you want to address, you know, and you make known to your client. We fixed that problem and this was before WordPress menus before 3.0. And, you know, they had like this hard coded menu and then I upgraded their WordPress site and then put in the menu and made it, you know, so they can edit it and everything. They were really excited, you know, they were super excited. They had some more work to do. They wanted a landing page, you know, it was very promotional, very marketing, had a video. And we kind of, I sat down with them and went over the most important parts of their business and we identified, you know, the things that they wanted to communicate to their crowd, their main audience. And we put up this landing page and they were really excited and so they were like, you know, we're getting ready for this big new site that we want to do. And I was like, oh yeah, this is going to be great. Custom theme, you know, this is what I want because I had this like kind of mangled, you know, marketplace theme that they were working with. And so they were like, yeah, just let me know how it's going to be, like how much it's going to be. And I was like, yeah, you know, I'll just give you a price. And so I talked to a designer, like a local designer in my town and came up with an estimate and I gave him some number. I can't remember what it was. It might have been like $5,000, something like that. You know, I was excited to get any kind of work and I had other client work as well, but I was, you know, growing my own business as a freelancer and never heard from him again. So I was like, what, you know, what did, they were so happy like, what did I do? You know, and so that like, if you're someone like me, you wonder about those things because it applies to your business, you know, you're, what did I do wrong as a business person? And so there were a couple of things that I didn't do. And so I'd like to talk about some of those things. And see, these are some things that have worked for me. So clearly defining everything that you do. Remember where I said that I sat down with them and talked about the things that were important in their business, their key audience and doing. I didn't communicate that those are the skills and things that I do as my business. I'm just a developer, right? I just write code, hire me to do that. But turns out I was not charging for a lot of the things that I was doing. And so what happened was a long while went by and I get a call from a fellow web shop in town. Really great people, love them. And they're like, hey, can you help us with this project? And I was like, sure, because they knew that I knew WordPress very well, right? And I was like, OK. And they pointed me to the site and it was my old client. They already had a new site and like a little sniffer than I am, I opened up the inspector tools and found out what theme they were using. Very popular marketplace theme from a very popular theme marketplace. And so I was like, yeah, sure, you know. OK, but it still just drove me nuts. Like, why did they abandon? I mean, I'm like the WordPress guy, right? And then they just hired someone to buy a marketplace theme and install it for them. So was it the changing market of services or was it me? Like, what is going on here? So explaining your skill set, do you sit down with your clients in the beginning and kind of map out what's going to happen with their new site? Do you even ask them why they need a new site? A lot of times clients come to us and they're like, you know, we want to do this, this, and this. But are you providing some value, some business consulting? You know, you're the liaison between their business and the internet. And you should be there to serve them. Is that part of your services? I wasn't defining that. I also wasn't defining that, hey, you know, maybe I followed the WordPress coding standards. What does that mean, you know? I hired a consultant. You know, this was years later, but I hired a consultant. His name is Matt Medeiros, maybe you've heard of him. And he just kind of laid out, he was like, go through a difficult project with me. And I was like, OK. And I had all these things I wasn't charging for. And I wasn't laying out any proposals. So what happened? Here, let's go to the next slide. So here's the story of the value developer. This is years later. I've had plenty of successful projects. I had someone approach me and it was kind of an enterprise level client in my book at least. And they had a pretty high budget for web development. I was like, great, this is awesome. And so I was like, what do I do? OK, you've got these, I'm a developer and I've got these sites that do for maybe like, you know, five to $8,000. And then here's this site for like $30,000. How do I make that jump and how do I justify it? So we laid out everything that I wasn't doing, basically. But then I wasn't writing down. I wasn't clearly defining. And it was a lot of stuff. So I wasn't really communicating the value that I'm going to provide to them. Not only my skills like I followed the WordPress coding standards, or I am going to sit and do information architecture, help map out their site, their staging and deployment maintenance. I was just giving them a number. Just dropping a number on some people. Being like, oh, it'll cost you this much. Kind of trying to do the value-based pricing without like reading much into it and really having a methodology for it. So clearly defining what you do is very important. And as a programmer, as someone who writes code, it's hard to do that. So you can't communicate the value through code. You can to some extent, but to your clients, you're going to end up sounding like this guy, a space robot. I use Gulp as a task manager. All the assets will be concatenated and minified. Aren't you excited? Your site's going to load so much faster with fewer HTTP requests. I've seen developers talk to clients like this. And they're like, oh man, this is like some, I'm going to woo them with my technical know-how, and then they'll hire me. Whereas they might be like, this guy's, I don't know what's going on. It's confusing. There's this other price over here. Let's just go over here. That doesn't make any sense to me. So there's another thing that I think is very important to communicating your value as a developer. And that is passion. If you're passionate about what you do, if you're passionate about making a business more profitable about providing good services to your client, building them a solid platform on which they can build their business, you're going to succeed. And that's also going to communicate to the person. If I walk into a meeting without any passion whatsoever, and I'm sitting there like, yeah, but that's going to be harder because we have to build a custom plugin and it's going to take so much time. That's going to communicate this is a chore. He doesn't care. But if I'm passionate about it, it's going to communicate and people are going to say, hey, this person really cares about my business as well. They're providing that value. They have a stake in it as well. And that's something that speaks. The next thing is being completely honest about what you do. And this is super important. I don't want to come to a client and say, I'm this full-stack developer. I do all this. Yeah, I know Rails. If you're a freelance WordPress developer, a lot of times we are also learning PHP at the same time. We've learned HTML and CSS and JavaScript. Maybe we're taking classes. And you can get really, really, really good at doing those things. It takes a lot of time. But I'm, be honest about your skill set. If you're, this comes to, are you a WordPress developer or are you WordPress implementer? And this kind of goes full circle to that first story that I told because the web shop that took that job, that took my client that I like so much, they were implementing WordPress. They were buying a theme, installing it, grabbing a bunch of plugins, installing them. And then when they had trouble with that, they asked me for help. So I don't know whether or not they were saying they were doing development, but it's very important to be honest about what you do. If you're just installing themes and plugins, say it. I mean, that has a lot of value too. There's nothing wrong with being a WordPress implementer. But if you're a developer, sell your skills as they are. You know, you're proficient, you're comfortable writing plugins, custom plugins for clients. You're comfortable doing custom themes and that's what you specialize in. You can also troubleshoot a lot of those pain points that come from sometimes people who implement. The implementers are very comfortable, perhaps with HTML and CSS. Maybe PHP snippets will drop in the functions file and it works, I really know why. But if you can put together a site like that for your client, be honest about it. And I found that being honest about your skills helps communicate the value you're going to provide. Price appropriately. It's something I wasn't doing either. You know, all those things, those clearly defined things that I was doing, they have their value. Taking time and understanding WordPress coding standards has a lot of value. Why? Well, if I'm following these standards and I create a solid plugin, it's going to make maintaining that a lot easier for people down the road. It's going to make it a lot easier for my client because they're not going to have to spend money and time fixing a poorly created solution for their website. You know, if I've spent so much of my time fixing problems with websites that were pieced together, you know, and so that has a lot of value. If you are trying to build a solid solution, communicate that. And price appropriately, you know, those things really do have their price. So I'd really like to hear from y'all if you feel inclined from a client perspective on developers or from a developer's perspective how you communicate value to your clients. Does anyone want to have anything to say? Better than other people. Everybody can be better than everybody. So, I mean, one of my, I know my most valuable things I bring to it is I'm usually friends already with my clients. So I don't necessarily get that question why should I hire you over somebody else. But I'm just so, some of it has seemed impossible to find for everybody. Yeah. Why you would, about your situation, did the client care that they hired and implemented? Did they need more? They may not have really been aware of it. You know, that maybe they were just shooting for a lower price because they couldn't afford it. But they had to, but whoever they were working with had to come back at some point and fix a problem that was there. So it did cost money, you know, in the end. And that's the thing you have to communicate. You know, if, how solid can you build a solution. But going back to what you were saying also is that you have like a friendly relationship a lot of times. And that also to me, maybe that also means hey, maybe I'm great to work with also. That has a lot of value, doesn't it? You know. That's it. I'll tell them I'm funny. Yeah, yeah. I mean, sure, you know. But, yeah, so. And developers that don't even know how to do a child theme and just customize within the theme options and like, ooh, do you find yourself a developer? Wow. But, and I would consider those information if they were test developers that do more interface design and can make it look pretty like through CSS and child themes. And then there's the advanced programmers that I call like you. And when we really meet them, we go to them. But I wouldn't say it's necessary to build, you know, those sites that other people can't really afford. You know, the full scale Ferrari kind of deal. So that's just my take on it. That's, that's really, that's very valuable because, exactly. You know, and that's the kind of thing as a developer when you price appropriately, you'll price out a lot of the people that can't afford you. But you'll be doing projects that you really enjoy doing. You'll be doing things that you want to be doing. You won't be kind of like, oh, I got to fix another thing. You might be doing those solid solutions and you might be at a higher price point. You know, because you've finally appropriately communicated the value you provide. Right, and it must, I mean, it's got to be hard finding a good developer that'll be at that, you know, at that level, so. I can troubleshoot and do some of the stuff and fix some code, but I can't write the code myself and scratch it. One of the troubles that I find, or the challenges that I find with clients is they don't know the difference. So what terminology do you use to help pull the, I mean, if I use developer, they're looking for designers and they don't really know what they're looking for or what they need. So how do you find that middle ground? Wow, that's a good question. You know, a lot of, for your clients, yeah. There's at least five different terms, at least. Well, you know, I would say as an implementer, my suggestion is as an implementer, you also have a major responsibility to understand what's going on in the WordPress community. You're here, thumbs up, you know. You're doing the right thing. You're at a WordCamp, you're here to learn, and you're doing the right thing. So I think implementing is something that is very, very common. A lot of people built great businesses on it, you know. But there will be a time when you need to hire a developer when something could come up, you know. And looking for those skills, you know, find out if the developer, you know, follows coding standards, find out, you know, if they've built plugins, how comfortable are they with PHP? If they're not comfortable with PHP, it could be a really big problem. I understand that part of it. The challenge is how do you get to the clients when they don't know what they're looking for and they're putting in the Google search term as developer. Someone told them they needed a developer when they don't necessarily need a developer yet. I can speak to some of that and how you might filter out some of it, but I know exactly what you're saying. I don't have the end-all, be-all of all businesses. By choice, I tend to be more of an implementer, but I have heavy, solid marketing and communication strategy behind it. But because... I was talking to somebody about this yesterday and I don't know if it's a big, ziggler thing or whatever, but you have to sell them what they want, so you may have to use terminology. You're like, on my website, I don't even know what I am. I'm a designer, I'm a developer, whatever. I don't need to be dishonest, and I am honest about my skill set, they don't even get that. So there's a little bit of education going on there, but you need those terms, yes, they're search-wise, but what I'm finding is there's so much out there that if you're looking at search traffic for your clients, you're really going to struggle with that because there's so much out there that for that kind of person, they're not even going to look at you unless you're charging $300 or something like that, so I can't feel to that. I'm appealing by word of mouth, and I had a client tell somebody last week that asked why I charge and what I charge. She looked at this person that questioned her about knowing she was working with me, and she said, you don't even know what you don't know. I haven't found a way to articulate that yet, but it's again, you're selling them what they think they want, and my price captures my value, and by the end of the process, hopefully they get the difference. Any developers in the room? You're part of explaining exactly what you do as part of educating. I'm a graphic designer, it does much more print design. So it's the same then, educate them and break it down. My thought, I like to point out literally defining what you do and don't, like you said, when I had a large project come to me, I defined everything I would be doing for the project. I wasn't a super nine page proposal or anything, but instead of just kind of like really nonchalantly shooting off a price point, I defined what I'd be doing and I defined what standards I would be following, and they saw the value in that. I'd be working through them with information architecture, content strategy, and everything they want to be there on the table. So... While everybody's just ability to solve somebody's problem, you can just find, through the developer, you still got a coordinated solution. So it doesn't really matter. Exactly, a lot of times the implementer and the developer work together on finding those solutions. It's very common. A lot of implementers, they're doing a lot of stuff on the admin side of the site. They're communicating with the client. A lot of times developers don't want to be doing that. It's different for someone like me as a freelance developer because I communicate a lot with my clients, but some developers are kind of more on the behind the scenes with agency work. Maybe not behind the scenes so much, but the implementer is kind of communicating what they need as far as functionality and the developers putting that forth. As a freelance developer, I try to do a thorough discovery process and find out what their goals are. What is the end goal? And try to define my proposal around they're going to make money from this thing. Because I've found over the years that clients don't care whether my PHP was fast or not. Am I going to make money from the contact form? Am I going to make money from this e-commerce store? So I try to find a proposal around that value when it comes to any client, but that's where you can get for technically your hedge. Yeah, I've found that communicating that technicality to the client has to be done in a very specific way, like performance. If you think about web performance, how fast does your site load? That can have a huge return on your client, for your client, as far as the value goes. Maybe that means one more person going to the checkout and putting in their credit card information because it didn't take them five minutes to load or something like that. So there's that communicated value, too. If you say, I'm going to spend this much effort on performance, then that has that added value, as well. I find sometimes a lot of people go to Wix where space are weekly now, and I started investigating those CMSs to see what they're offering because people are telling me they're offering more and more and more just like WordPress is. It's kind of scary, but since there's part of me that's like, okay, well, that's what they need, and they want to go pay for that, then let them. And then usually what happens is when they do need more functionality or want to pay for more and are limited in some way by their CMSs, then they come back to you many years later. So maybe your target audience is dealing with lower-end programmers that can't do the high-end stuff that people like maybe come to you when you do need that kind of functionality. So maybe that's your angle of getting the types of clients that you need or something. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of times I'm dealing with agencies, so I'm in a very similar position, but I do have some clients I've retained over the years, and it's been interesting watching my communication with them evolve. At first, I get real techy, and I want to talk to them techy, but you just can't do that. All right, so our challenges, we had one, I wouldn't say they were client, they were potential client. We talked to them about the site elsewhere. It looks great. Technically, it's a disaster. One, I don't even know. I'd like to help them because they built a new URL with the build-in and iframe over, and just weird. I wanted to tell them how you should have used us. But it's more articulating that ahead of time. Yeah. We won't screw up, but I'm sure the other guy will screw up either. Our challenge is proving that we know, we try to articulate that. That's our biggest challenge. Yeah, it's all... We won't screw up, and they won't screw up, and they'll have to price up, and then they can do it. Yeah, and I think if... I've just had luck communicating, clearly defining everything I'm going to be doing, and in that communication talking about following some best practices in WordPress, and maybe simply writing out what those are, and perhaps the other shop that put it together and kind of piece-mealed it, maybe they didn't do that, and that might communicate to the client, oh, they're going to do this, follow best practices and standards and that sort of thing, and they wrote out why. Maybe it's worth that price. Maybe it's going to go down the road with maintainability and updates and all that kind of stuff. That has a lot of value. Yeah, you know, a common... the scalability is kind of a cliche term, sure, but, you know, a common thing that I don't see as much as I used to was the very popular and queuing your own jQuery library and a plug-in or theme, and I just spent so much time fixing that problem, and that's what it means to the client, you know? So having a solid, you know, following best practices and having a solid solution goes a long way. And communicating that... Show them the client. It's much more meaningful. My code will load your page faster. Mm-hmm. You have a graphic that shows, you know, half a page loaded and for this far advanced back button, you know, or the site loaded in two seconds and so Google, you know, indexed you high. Or someone abandoned their shopping cart and someone else made a purchase. If you can show them why and you can quantify it, you know, two seconds versus 24 seconds gets you this. It's much more meaningful than telling them you're great at PhD. Absolutely. That's a really great insight because something like performance is, you know, that's a metric that we can use. That's measurable. And a picture is worth a whole lot of technology. Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely. I was just going to say I've been listening to a lot of value-based podcasts recently and one of the things that they say is the more you can position yourself in the conversation in your services in the long-term investment and not as an expense. So how much, some of those examples and stories and case studies that you shared, how much more will those add to the overall value of their business, the longevity of their websites, some of those kinds of things that are more of a long-term investment and not just a short-term expense that should be decreased to as little as possible. That made me think about the passion part because if I'm passionate if I'm really excited about, you know, helping your business-term profits and I'm going to be there for the long haul, then we're both really making an investment together, you know. So... I was just wondering if, you know, if I could hire you for like five hours a month just, you know, when I have a question like to answer a question or if I have a thing that I want to do like you could implement this little train but we had a whole out-of-long conversation about what wasn't working for her and hearing her story and, you know, ended up out of that, you know, with actually a redesign of her theme to bring it up to standards, you know, with looking at a feature like a Phase 2 implementation of working with custom post types to make certain things that she's doing now or, you know, but she's explaining to me like how she does just like a library page on her site and she's explaining how hard that is and, you know, and telling me her story about that and I said, well, you know, this sounds like an opportunity that you might want to consider, you know, what's called a custom post type and she goes, yes, I want that. I need that. So, you know, just like letting them talk about I mean, everything? Listening. Yeah. And that goes into like, you know, some of the services that you provide, you know, do you help them with their content strategy but not only that, do you help them with their web architecture? How does their content fit into the architecture of WordPress? Do you know the template hierarchy, how that works, how that's going to be used to leverage their content and use WordPress's data architecture to present their content? It's very, very, very helpful. It seems very simple but as soon as you do that they disengage from you but if you can take the time to understand where they are and then position your conversation to that point you go so much further and you really can connect with WordPress. Yeah, I think there's, you know, there's a lot of developers will use a lot of technical know-how to intimidate it happens, you know, and they'll that's kind of like a cop-out really because it's like saying, okay, I can answer your question really easily by just talking really technical, making you feel stupid perhaps and you should just do it this way when really what you need to be doing is listening to your client and figuring out the best solution working together essentially. Exactly, and that's how you build relationships and that has a lot of value, yeah. You sit down and you listen to your client about what their needs are and then you see if your skill sets match their needs and if they do you can take back and key back to them exactly what they told you they needed I have the ability to do e-commerce and whatever so you're listening to them and then feeding it back and then freelance developers and small businesses people who are trying to do this need to be very aware of is that there are people out there that will sit you down and talk your ear off and you have to limit that and you can have an initial conversation but if somebody's trying to figure out I want to do a website how much do you charge it's like going to a home builder and saying how much is it going to cost me to build a house and the question is what kind of house do you want to build well if you sit down there and have that whole conversation and figure out everything they need and build a checklist of what you got to do so you can figure out the pricing you're going to waste a lot of time with people who have no money so one of the things that we found is very easy to do is we'll sit down and have an initial conversation and then we'll say we will sit down with you and build you a detailed checklist that you need to have in a website there's a fee for this but then you can take this checklist if you don't like our price and you can shop it to somebody else and now you know what needs to be in it because if you know a quote is not always the same quote depending on where you go because they don't know all the things that you need to have done and sometimes the clients aren't educated enough to know what their needs are so we'll educate them as to what's possible they tell us what they need and then we can give them an accurate quote if they don't like our quote as a result of paying for our consultation they have a document they can take and go out and shop on the streets yeah I have a lot of people approach me and I set up a consultation time for a fee and we kind of map out their problem see what's going on and there's a lot of people that don't want to do that and that's fine there's a lot of people that do and they're willing to sit down and pay for that because they see the value in that I relatively do and the difference I think is there are a lot of very small businesses that need implementers they don't need nor can they afford a developer but the general public doesn't know the difference or individuals are providing quote unquote web design being an implementer they don't know the difference they come to developers when they have big issues but don't know what they're doing they're just using it like you use Photoshop or like you use Illustrator or like you use any other tool and they're just making any other developers have any developers in the room have any insight to the work through an agency which is run by a graphic designer she claims to have developers on staff but she doesn't she's an implementer she has an implementer and they claim to have developers if they have a client and they can meet the needs with a theme and some plugin they do it and if not then during that consultation they explain that this is going to be a little bit more expensive I don't think the client ever knows that the site needs the agency but they outsource parts of the site sometimes more parts than others to me or another developer and that I think is a really good solution for some people who are implementers but if you build yourself that way you won't get any business that kind of goes a little bit into the honesty thing I agree I've worked with an agency that openly says we have a handful of developers that we work with they don't say they're on staff there's a lot of pictures on people's staff websites that are there every day right and that's fine and that makes sense if you have a solid group of developers that you can call on but even as implementers you need to vet those developers you need to see what their skill set is and you know and see how they're communicating that we're going to work with I think that's a more honest approach I guess my perspective is I'm not sure all of the customers really even care I think they just want somebody who knows how to manage the process but they need yeah I think we've heard that echoed several times and I think that's they just want a solid solution and again I'm talking about communicating the value as a developer sometimes I do that to clients and sometimes most of the time is to agencies but again those agencies or small time shops, implementers they also have to find developers and so how do I communicate that value as a developer to those people I find really great designers and really great photographers if I can't do the implementation how how smart I can for if they need it they might for you first and you end up with me and I end up with you I think you call yourself an advanced developer because I feel like that's what you are is it okay? some people do that they need an advanced developer and that would be the audience I think some of the stuff you use the house analogy you're a general contractor and that's it you hire a plumber they don't care if people walk in their house and help that's right as long as the house stays on the floor when the shower is on do you have any strategy with that? absolutely alright I think we're just going to close it up there and I really appreciate all of your insight I enjoyed speaking with you and I enjoyed hearing you thank you