 So, talk is, that you all knew, how to sail through the Bermuda Triangle of Web Designer Hell to get to WordPress Pro, and I'm going to skip about me, but, well, no, I won't. So I'm a psychologist and a serial entrepreneur, and I had a software company where we did medical records for psychiatric hospitals, and after I sold that company, I never wanted to go back to being a psychologist again, and I sold that, and then I didn't know what I was going to do. I knew I had to work, but I didn't know what I was going to do next until I was sitting in the coffee shop helping people with their websites because I had made my own, and so forth and so on. It was during the recession when everybody was getting fired from Turner Broadcasting and AGC, and I would be helping them figure out what they wanted to do for their business, and other people would hear me, and they'd say, can I have your card? I'm like, I don't have a card, and they'd say, well, I don't care, I want to work with you. I said, I don't have a business. Then I thought, well, maybe I do have a business, famous last words. Today I have a five-person agency, and I love my work, and it keeps getting better all the time, and so one of the things I wanted to talk about was this thing that happened over the last couple of years. I was doing these talks on user experience in WordCamps and usually in a ballroom, and we would teach homepage user experience things, what do you need to do on your homepage to make it effective, and then I'd take people's website URLs and we critique them live in the session, and I was really shocked, actually, that there were so many people struggling to make websites that would be effective. We'd put a website up there and I'd be like, oh, who can tell what this company does? When you're used to seeing your own website or websites you're building for others, you're not seeing them with fresh eyes, so the whole ballroom would go home, we can't tell, and that would happen over and over again, and then afterwards I'd have a line out at the door in the happiness room wanting to talk about their websites, and I remember being in that situation where after I built my first website and I thought it was really great, I didn't know, then it wasn't so easy after that. That was easy, and so that's what this talk is going to be about. So, how many current or aspiring WordPress web designers or developers are out in the audience? Yay, you're my people. And is your goal to price close, build, and deliver effective websites for satisfied clients? Yeah, it's a good goal, you know that's not really very easy to do for a lot of people are not being able to do that. So does this sound like you? Your website projects start to spiral out of control costing you time and money, but you don't know how to stop it from happening again, keep falling into the same track. I know that's happened to me. How about this one? You want to confidently build client websites without spinning your wheels and doubting your abilities? What about this one? You've been going to meet-ups and attending work camps, maybe even studied web design, learned HTML, CSS, but you're not making progress as a freelancer that you would have thought you would make and it's still, you're not making the money, you're spending too much time, it's not working out for you quite like you thought it would. So what's going on? Well here, when I would come away from those work camps and I had the line out the door, I was like, there's so many people they need so much and how do you get from where they are to where they need to be and I started thinking about it and I started thinking about my own journey and there's this learning model called conscious competency where at stage one is you're unconsciously incompetent and you're making a website, you made a few and you think they're great, they might even be pretty good. My first website was for a friend of mine, I finally said, okay, I'll take your money and she was a music producer and she had just done a great photo shoot with all of her people and she was working with like CELO and India RE and all these engineers and so I had great material to work with with this website together. I thought it was so good that I should send it into the WordPress showcase. Now that is the prime definition of unconscious incompetence. Then somebody said, Judy, those people that are on the showcase, here's the criteria for getting on the showcase, I'm like, oh, okay. So in that regard, unconscious incompetence is where you don't, unconscious incompetence is where you don't know what you don't know. You like web design, you think it'll be a great new career for yourself. You've made a website or two but you have no way to accurately judge the quality of what you're doing and how far you are from doing good work and so then what happens is that you get to stage two and this happens pretty quickly where you go whoa and this is where you're staying up till three in the morning, you're making about three dollars an hour and you're conscious of your incompetence and you're discouraged because it makes you anxious because whenever you get a new client, you're like, how am I going to make this work, what am I going to do, what theme am I going to do, blah, blah, blah, blah. You wish you had a systematic process for learning a way and a way to get feedback from experts when you need it. So I was a little lucky back in the day because I had an event space and so there was a coffee shop across town that was doing a WordPress meetup and coming back from that really disappointed every month because you couldn't hear anybody talk. It was like, oh, here are the gods of WordPress and I can't even ask them a question because it's too noisy in this place. Then I thought, well, maybe they need help and so I asked and they said yes, they'd love to have the meetups in my place so we'd have people, 60 people at a time. I have an event space and so we do it there and the good thing about that is I got to then, I had to then, also help find the people to do the talks and looking back on it, what I did to get through that next stage is I curated my own education. I'd find people to talk on topics that I needed to know and I'd be around them and so I thought back, it was still a miserable time that conscious incompetence is difficult but that's how I did it and not everybody has that ability to do it, although it is a good idea. So the next stage is unconscious competence. That's where you're doing it just effortlessly. You don't even realize, you forget how hard it was and you're doing, and this pertains to anything you're learning. So you can imagine if you were learning by then, you'd go through this same stage but when you got down to stage two, you'd get yourself a teacher, there'd be a curriculum, you'd study this and you'd get along but it doesn't work that way, well we did that, but it doesn't work that way. There's not really a curriculum. If you go to school for web design, you learn CSS and HTML and JavaScript and this, you get out of school, you can't be a freelancer because that isn't even something that you do unless you, I mean most people want a WordPress site, they don't want you to build a site from scratch and we've seen a lot of people come, we have General Assembly in Atlanta and a lot of people go to those courses and then show up in the meetup groups, thank God they got there because they're like, they don't know what to do to build a website for anyone. So how do you get from that conscious incompetence to what I call pro-confidence? And the pro-confidence is not back here where you are such a high level, working at such high level that you don't even remember what it was like, but it's in between, you're on your way and the definition of that pro-confidence is that you know your stuff, you know what you're doing, it takes some effort, it's not effortless, but you know what you're doing and you're not afraid to take bigger and bigger projects because you know that you can get them done, you know that you can take care of things and it just feels like you're on your way to having a great career because you keep getting better clients, you're managing the scope, you're doing things right. So then you ask yourself, well okay, how do you get from two to pro-level of competency? And that's what I call the Bermuda Triangle because so many people get caught there and I would see so many people that it started out with me that we're coming to meetups who are still flailing around in the choppy waters of that place and not being able to get out. I thought, what can they do? What's going on here? And what I realized from talking to people and really looking at this is that there's actually seven core competencies, there are probably more, but there's at least seven core competencies to becoming a good WordPress designer slash developer because it could be either one. But if you're going to be a freelancer and doing websites for people, you need to have a foundation in all of these different areas. And I had been blogging for, I have nine years so far, I've been blogging every Wednesday. And I took on my blog post and I did a sort into categories and it kind of came out like this and I'm like, oh, so then I called it the seven core competency framework. So just going over those and what I'm going to do here is go over the seven core competencies and then I'm going to give you a couple of examples of things that are really important pivotal things that if you can do those things, you'll have a foot up if you don't make those mistakes or whatever. And so the seven core competencies are obviously, you have to know something about managing client business, managing your clients and business skills. You have to have some user experience and usability. I say one of the tricks really of impressing your clients is just do some reading all the time on some, follow some of the usability blogs. And then when they, when people come in, you can talk about, oh yeah, the research shows, blah, blah, blah, that people will scroll as long as they don't hit the bottom and they know something, if they're motivated and they know there's more to come. You throw out some of those things that I think are fascinating and the clients are like, whoa, she really knows what she's talking about. So I mean that's an example of something in that area that you have to be armed with the latest data because how many people have let a client talk them into some weird thing that they should never have let the client talk them into doing that end up taking way too much time and aren't even in their best interest. Yeah, we all have. Design skills. It's amazing how, so it's amazing how if you're a designer you think everybody can tell the difference between something that looks good and looks bad. I'm here to tell you that that's not true. I've got a couple of developers in a course, I'll tell you more about my course later, but in my course right now that I haven't had the developers in it and they are really constitutionally incapable of knowing this automatically. And so, you know, we've had to really go over rules like, you know, all these things that I haven't had to teach designers, you know, white space and proximity and how you have to line things up and how actually the hex code colors that you're using, your brand colors, you actually have to look up the codes and use them consistently. I mean, if you do all of these little rules, your site's going to look better even if you don't understand like initially what makes a good design. It's really interesting to kind of see someone who doesn't have that and what they need to be able to even say, oh, this was, this is a good site and this one isn't a very high quality. Online marketing, you need to know how to help your clients with email newsletters, with sales funnels, with sales page pages. You need to know what makes an effective website and you need to probably be doing, not probably, you need to be doing those things yourself. WordPress skills, that's, you know, that's just one of the competency areas. But WordPress skills are important, whether you're a technician, designer, developer, you know, all of those, those, you know, you hear, I think, WP MU talks about, what do they call people, I can't remember, but it's kind of derogatory. Who aren't developers who are building WordPress sites? Implementers. Implementers? Come on. You know, it takes a lot more to make an effective website. Somebody that's just an implementer maybe could put a WordPress site up, but they certainly can't build an effective website. Technical skills, you know, all of the technical skills. I can't tell you how many times clients have come to me and they've said, I just lost all my SEO with the last person that I used because they didn't redirect their 301 redirects from my old HTML site to the WordPress site they built. And if that site was an e-commerce site, that is a real big problem. I mean, if it's just some dog training site and they weren't getting any business anyway, but you know, that's anyway. You should know those things. A lot of people don't have the depth in knowing those things. So I wanted just to give you a couple of core, of a couple of the areas that, a couple of things that I found in some of these areas that can make a big difference in your confidence and competence of towards being a WordPress pro. And these are just some examples from, that I've come up with based on having looked into this and then created a curriculum. So after being worried about all these people that I couldn't help individually, I decided to make a course. And I can't, when I was a kind of kid or you know, teenager that in Home Act I couldn't make an apron. I had to make like a dress or I couldn't just make a cake. I had to make baked Alaska. You know, it's like, I can't just do it small. So I decided I would make a course that covered all of these competency areas. And I thought after I had done these, you know, changed, put my blog post in all these categories, I actually did a six, five month pilot with six people who paid $2,500 a piece to be in the pilot to get this information over the six, five or six months and then have coaching with me during the week. And so it went really well. And one of the, one of the things I have people do is do their own website first. How many of you have a website your own that you really think does a good job for you to bring in clients? Yeah, a few. And that is, that is the common thing that not very many people put themselves first. And I'm telling you, if you want to get more money for your sites, say you're even really good, you're not going to unless you can show who you are and what you do. I like to tell people that if you can sell in person, then we have to bottle that and we have to put it on the website. And so you have to do that for yourself, which is one of the hardest things to do is do your own website. But in my course, that's what the main deliverable is. First, learn all these things by doing it with your own website. So you walk out of here with a great website. So client and business management, I'm going to go over the pricing websites like a pro. So you have to have your own great website and you have to know who your people are, who your clients are. You have to be confident enough to, about what you do. And you have to have a system to, from the first time the person calls. And so you have to do all this because, and you have to have some way of dealing with the price because you know, overpricing is going to alienate people, underpricing will just, you're going to lose some money on the job. So you have to be able to not go into panic mode when you think about pricing a website. So I created a five step process and it starts with a free, I'm going to go over it tomorrow in more detail, a short phone call, free phone call, call me, let's talk about it. And that phone call is solely to qualify whether this is a good lead. And if it is, at 10 minutes can talk, to go to 15 or 20 minutes if I'm having a good conversation and connecting because the whole goal of that phone call, once you've qualified them, is to set up a paid consultation. And I have them come to my office. I rarely ever, unless it's a huge client, go to their office. I have them come to me. And so they pay $150, it's not much. And I call it a consultation. And I say to the first step of working with me is to set up that consultation. We go over what you're doing, your business, your, you know, it's not just me telling them what I do. It's finding out what they do, what they need and what's going on for them, giving them that user experience data and different things that can help them. So if they don't work with me, they can take that information and go to anybody, they'll be better off. So during that paid consultation, when you're really diving into their business, instead of saying, okay, so what's your business? Yeah, did you bring three websites that you like? Oh, yeah, yeah, we can make you one like this. You know, you've no people that do that, right? So, so, so if you're getting into their business and you're really, you know, they see that you're interested and a lot of people feel like they don't have business experience. So how can they really understand or talk about this person's business? But it's just a matter of being interested and inquiring about, well, what things are profitable? You've got 750 items on the store. Are all of them profitable? Well, I don't know. You know, well, let's look, you know, stuff like that. Just diving into the things and to make them think, to make them know that you care about their business and have some idea about how you need to do their website to make it, you know, effective for them, not like anybody else's website, but for them. And then if you do that well, they're going to go, well, how much will this cost? And then that's when everybody goes, oh, well, I should have gone out and looked at the car and the driveway or, you know, what, I wonder how much they can afford and all of that. Well, so in order for me to teach the client my course, people my course, how to price websites, I made this thing that I'm going to show tomorrow called the website cost estimator. And the website cost estimator, it's, I did it in gravity forms and you go through, it's a series of maybe 30 questions. I don't know how many because some of them, it's conditional logic. So if they need a store, then it goes into asking them all the online shopping stuff. But one of the first questions is what kind of client are you going to be? You have champagne taste and you want it like you want it? 2000 extra, it comes up 2000. You know, if you just, it first asks whether it's a refresh or a new website or, you know, whatever. And that gives a certain amount as a baseline. Then the champagne taste, the reserve, are you going to make me pull it out of you? That's 500 extra. Are you going to be really easy to work with and collaborative and we're going to have a great time? That's zero extra. But they laugh and they know it's true. So I've had people go through it, go through that and maybe they worked for a nonprofit. They were the head of a nonprofit and they say, well, yeah, I have champagne taste, but you know, I'm going to be like really easy to work with. And by the time we get to the bottom, she says, you can tell she's been stewing about it. Could you go back to that champagne taste question? And you need to check yes. You know, but what a great thing that you get that out of the way right up front so you can talk about it. Remember you said you didn't have champagne taste. We're into champagne taste territory. And so you either need to go back, you know, scale back how many times we revise this little thing or whatever you're asking for that or we've got to charge more. And they know it then, you know. So you go through how many forms do you want? One form? That's no extra. Do you want three forms? Then that's extra and it gives a price, content, everything. And it's so much fun because they get to say, Oh, well, I thought I wanted this, but I know I don't have the money for an e-commerce store right now. So I guess we'll just put some photos, you know, on and do the e-commerce and website 2.0 or something. They get to see it's not just something you can pull out of the sky. It takes hours. It takes work. And so you get to the it's adding these things up as you go along and you get to the price. And they feel like they have collaborated and coming up with their own price. And so most of the time when I do it, somebody goes, Oh, okay. And if it's too much, then we go back and we take we adjust instead of just coming down off the price. We say, Okay, what don't you need? Or what can we how can we get this down? You maybe give up your champagne taste or whatever. And so by the time they walk out of the office, all I have to do is go to propose a fight, go to my proposal template, put all this stuff in there and send it to them. And they've already agreed. And so it is so seamless. And if you want, if you're whether you're coming to my talk tomorrow, I think it's 66866. If you text 66866, you can put your email in and I'll send you the stuff for the paper version of the pricing websites like pro. And so you'll also get on my mailing list. So 66866. Uh huh. No, propose a fight as a software for as a service. It's it's really easy to use. And once you put your make a few templates for various types of of projects, you really just have to go in and customize the front letter and, you know, customize, you know, put just tweak it. And so I can do a proposal so fast, having put a little time into it on getting those getting my own template set up. So, um, so I mean, those are the kinds of things, you know, why take you should send your proposal right away. And propose a fight says, you know, the faster you send him a proposal, the faster you, you know, if you send him a proposal right away, I can't remember the statistics, but the longer you wait, the less chance you have of getting that contract signed. So that's just an example. The pricing websites like pro of what can make a huge difference in the area of business. 66866. Does that work? I think it's WordPress mastery or WordPress pro, WordPress pro. You know, wouldn't you think I would remember this? Tell me if that works. The what? WordPress pro. WordPress pro. And then you'll get the, you'll get the whole dog and pony show about how to do these meetings and the paper version and a PDF version of the questions that I've asked. And then you can buy the automated version for $47 later if you want to, but it's just great to have them feel like they understand where the price is coming from because most people have no idea. And they do really think you're pulling it out of the air. And so given you can pull something out of the air, they think, well, why can't it be like cheaper? So, so, so that's a web site cost estimator. So another, this is a slide about the, how the paper version works. And there's a word version and a PDF so you can actually, if you want to use it with your own clients, you can adjust the items and the pricing and you can actually make it into a gravity forms yourself or pay $47 for us to do it. So the next thing is an example of one of the things that has made a huge difference in our, our work with making effective websites. You know, people are always talking about telling the story, you know, on the homepage. A lot of people get that confused. They think it's their story, their website, their business story. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's your clients. It's your, it's telling the story of how you're going to help your clients reach their goals. And so there's a, I was already doing this, but Donald Miller, who knows Donald Miller and story brand? Yeah, if you don't go, go to a site. He's a master marketer for one thing. But the story brand framework is really great. Because, you know, it translates well to have your clients help you get the information that you need to be able to help them create an effective website. How are we doing on time? I wish we had a, okay. So the story brand, you have a character. It's not you. It's your client. They have a problem. They need something. That's hopefully what you have to sell or to provide. But if they just needed something, it could go out and get it, it wouldn't be very interesting, would it? I mean, they wouldn't need you. They just go get it. They wouldn't be hunting for, for something has happened. They have a problem that they haven't gotten it. And in web design, it's often things with our clients is they've worked with a freelancer who doesn't call them back, doesn't give them what they, you know, doesn't ever keep their appointments. Or they've worked with an agency that they get punted off because they're smaller, punted off to the interns. You know, they have some sort of problem. So we are little niche is for people that want a small agency. They don't want to just work with the one person person or have to go get your branding and your content and all of these things from other places and bring it back to the developer. They want a one stop shop. So when they come to our website, they find a one stop shop. So they have, so knowing what the problems are, then the external problems, internal problems, even philosophical problems. If you know that whatever you're selling, somebody feels like maybe they don't deserve it, or they shouldn't spend so much, or they should do it themselves, then you can address those objections in your copy. Not like even kind of just not, you don't have to like say that you're doing that, but you know that you're doing that by the kinds of information that you're giving them. So the more you can identify the client and the problems they're having, and what's interfering with them getting this whatever they want, then you can go to the next step. You're the guide. And so you need to present yourself as having the answer to the problem. And you need to present yourself or your business or your company as empathetic with what's going on with them and as an expert. And then the next thing, and all of these things are things that are going on the home page or helping in terms of text and images and all sorts of things building that story on the front page. So then so many people's websites don't have any call to action or don't really tell them how, what is the process of working with you? And so you give them a plan right on the front page. And it could be if this is a creek, the plan might be to get across the creek. I'm going to step one foot on this side of the creek. You see that rock on the other foot, and then the other. You don't have to have an elaborate plan because you want to keep it really simple. But just seeing a little plan, you know, first make a short phone call. Second, set up consultation. Third, you know, period. And then that subliminally walks them through being able to see themselves actually calling you. Calls to action. Secondary, call me, set up an appointment, whatever it is. Secondary, set up a way for them to sign up for your newsletter so that you don't lose them and you can nurture them along. There's also portraying what success looks like and what failure looks like. So on the top hero image, one of my friends, Cliff Seale, uses this example and I can't stop thinking about it. He saw a toenail fungus billboard and it had a picture of a foot with a toenail fungus on it. Well, I was googling because we were doing a presentation together, toenail fungus, you never want to do that. It is really awful. But you wouldn't want to put the picture of the nasty foot. You would want to put the picture of a beautifully manicured foot at the beach or whatever. And so you want to show them what success looks like. And just a tiny bit about failure. Like in the toenail fungus you wouldn't have a photo of it, but you would like say well you don't want to happen. And so it gives you a little framework. So I'm going to show you really quickly in this website, The Virtual Divorce, how some of those things played out here. She does a divorce, online divorce is in California. And she's an attorney and so what do you put on the top? Not a fighting couple, not a happy person, one sex or another. So we wanted to introduce the fact that her message interested in a fast easy affordable divorce. We do this, we do that. Talk directly to them. Are you interested in a fast easy affordable divorce? We got those words right from the clients. That's what they were interested in. And so we used their words. And primary call to action. We supplemented making sure that they knew it was just in California. Empathy message. Ending a marriage is hard. The divorce process shouldn't make it worse. Now online divorce in California. Then there's a more empathy where she's saying some divorcing couples feel so bitter and betrayed that they're not able or willing to play fair blah blah blah blah ends up being expensive blah blah blah. That's the taste of the negative. On the other hand, some couples who are respectful each other blah blah blah can end up saving you money, making a better outcome with your kids. And she's painting the positive story. Then the expertise by, it's just her. So don't say we, it's just her. And people, if you're just a one person shop or your client is, go with that as a strength because they're going to know you're not a we if they're working with you. So she says I'm an attorney that provides online divorces in California blah blah blah blah. And there's a picture of her. So that's a trust builder. There's another call to action up in the header. Here's some empathy statements in terms of what clients say. You can look at this. It's called the virtual divorce dot com I think. And so the testimonials, she has benefits of a virtual divorce. She kind of got carried away and they're not even, which bothers me, but you can't, once you give it to them, you know, another primary call to action. Oh, here's her getting started. A simple three step plan. Schedule a 15 minute call. Choose a divorce package for you. Schedule a consultation session. So and then more empathy. Not quite ready for a divorce. How about some divorce coaching. And so you can see how going through that exercise of the brand story helps us figure out what's on the page. Well, for most small companies, we charge $1500 just to help them with the brand story and to make their homepage better than normal. And so that's another thing. They're like, oh, nobody else has said that they could do that. I want a website that really does that for me. So, you know, that's another example in that area of how you can in the area of content really help elevate your business and feel more confident yourself. All of my students who have started using this with their clients, instead of like not having a language to talk about how you're going to get started, you can take that little form and go through that and give them homework and go over it and it helps you. It's an organizing tool that helps you figure out what you're going to do with them on their homepage. And I feel like once you've got that homepage nailed, you're home free. You know, you've got the design, you've got content, the other pages fall into place. So the final one I'm going to go over is the biggest mistake of broke web designers is hopping around from theme to theme. How many people when they were new started like every time you got a new website, you'd look for the right theme. I mean these days with theme builders and stuff, that isn't as common as it was when I first started out because you just look for the perfect theme that had everything how you wanted it. And the problem with that is you were learning a different theme every time. You didn't know whether, I call it the bad boyfriend, theme selection because you think, oh, I found the perfect theme. Oh my god, it's perfect for this. It's great, it's going to be great. You do it, you spend all this time with it. You got just right and there's some fatal flaw. It's an alcoholic. The theme developers aren't supporting it or it's getting supported too many times and it's got too many updates or God knows it's slow as a dog and nobody's telling you what to do about it. So find a theme framework that you can use, learn how to just make it do whatever you want. Because our clients say, well, do you start with a theme? I said everybody starts with a theme because WordPress doesn't work without a theme but we start with a bare theme and we build it like we start and do Beaver Builder or if the client's already working with something we'll use theirs but their theme builder but we'll build it from scratch based on how it needs to be built. So don't go swapping around all over the place and you go to, the problem with going to meetups and work camps and stuff is you hear so many different people say so many different things. It's like the shiny object, oh, maybe I should do this. Maybe I should, oh, somebody really loves Divi but somebody else said that it can make your head spin. So that's a huge thing. If you can do that, it's a little awkward at first but it's part of professional development and if you are a non-designer, you don't have any design skills, don't start working with a theme builder because you'll make a huge mess. So in that case, start with studio press child themes and so my developers that I'm working with said start with a theme developer, I mean a studio press theme so one of them picked this pretty bold child theme. I think it's called Makers Pro and he puts his stuff in. I said okay, you're going to show us your website today. He shows us this website. I'm like, I thought you were going to use Makers Pro and it has big font and not minimal pictures but it designs a lot with the font and he said I did. I said, well what's this blue font the small blue font here is a headline. He had changed all the headlines. He had changed it all and so I'm like we had to have the conversation of what makes a design. I said what makes this theme look good is the fact that this big headline repeats different places on the page and when you just change that to this, it's really interesting. So now they're back and you like sticking with the understanding what made it a theme that they liked and trying to fit the content into that and if they needed a new widget area, they're developers. They can make a new widget area. So there are tricks depending on what your strengths and weaknesses are that allow you to be more confident and competent and it's been really wonderful working with the students that have gone through my course because the other deliverable is they have to apply and speak at a word camp and some of them have done that. You don't have to do that but quite a few of them got their websites finished and have spoken at even more than one word camp now and they were just really elevated to have that experience that they could be recognized for what they knew and what they did and that they had a great website. So those are the... I think I have some takeaways here. So study each of these competency areas. Somebody today said you should always be learning so I'm a big reader so I do read like for 30, 40 minutes every morning and dive into things on a bigger basis regularly. That's what you really have to do. Get involved and help run a meetup so you have some leeway in what you need to know. Join my newsletter which if you signed up for WordPress Pro, on one word you'll get on it. Work with a mentor. If you don't know your sites are terrible, who's going to tell you? It's really helpful to have someone who gently tells you maybe you should stick with the studio press theme and why. So getting feedback from people in the field who you trust, the same thing with a mentor but if you have a group of people because you can't get better in a vacuum, you just won't because you don't know what you don't know and you could think that your website belonged to the WordPress showcase. Thank goodness I had a friend tell me that that wasn't the case. You can sign up for a course. My course goes into it has four months now of online courses with ten modules probably five to ten lessons a module with a video, a transcript, an assignment and a quiz and then we do coaching every week. We'll be doing another one in October but there's other ones, there's other people doing things, Troy Dean's WP Elevation, you can talk to Melanie about that. It just depends on what kinds of how much hand holding you'd like but I don't know very many courses that give you a foundation in all of the areas you don't know that you needed to have and then once you have that foundation then you know where you're going so once you have that theme that you're working on getting to be a pro in it you know oh I've just got to keep studying this but if you don't know which theme and you're going through that every week it's not going to work out for you. So basically that's how to get out of the WordPress the Bermuda Triangle where you're spinning your wheels and so forth. There are tricks of the trade for each of those many more, for many in each one of those competency areas that can rocket, I mean rocket your success just by knowing you know to use that story brand framework or to have a way of pricing the websites and you start to accumulate those systems and techniques and all of a sudden your websites are getting much better you're able to double your prices, double your prices again you know it just works so thank you any questions? It's a psychological it's a psychological thing and I have so many I know so many people that spend their entire week so many freelancers spend their whole week going to this person's office or that person's office and laying out their whole dog and pony show and not really coming away with knowing whether it landed or didn't land and because that person doesn't have any skin in the game so you need to do something, charging them for the appointment and not making it so easy you know you just don't want to make it easy for them to get some little hurdles that they end up knowing do you know that like if you do something for someone you think they would like you more the research shows if they do something for you they like you more isn't that odd and so you're asking them to come to your office and to pay and if you don't have an office then I don't know you can get an office it helps to have people think you're more than working out of your bedroom so to piggyback on that with a lot of geographically spread outlines do you feel like that would work on phone or do you do like a video chat? I do zoom how many? thank you, yeah if it's a geographically if it's a geographic issue then I do the meetings on zoom and I just again charge for the consultation and then we do the whole thing on zoom and it works just fine but it works better if you know better in person because you can get that you know that personal relationship but zoom is pretty darn good yeah and even doing the website cost estimator over the phone it works it's I've done that too yeah other questions? yes no it's just it's like you can if you I've got the paper version but the one that you'll get the paper version the pdf and the word version but then I plugged it into gravity form and so if you get the one that I already programmed with gravity forms you get the jason file and you just upload the file and you're good to go you pay forty seven dollars no if you signed up at the wordpress pro if you sign up to my newsletter today you'll get the info on the pricing websites like the whole nine yards of the pricing websites like pro including the paper version but it does tell you that the automated version is available and the automated version if you can also just tweak if you know how to change things in gravity forms so but it's a lot easier I've had people say they built it from the paper version but all that conditional logic is pain in the neck yeah forty seven dollars yeah I have a different website does the price builder would it be appropriate for someone who's a new developer or is it based on if you're really experienced so which one? your price estimator the pricing websites like a pro good for a newbie or it's based on my prices for regular people regular businesses we do a lot of larger if you throw it all out the window when you have a large team and on there it says if this is a large team then you know this isn't appropriate because it's a whole different ball game but for most of our normal businesses for a pretty easy normal business site with a brand story it ends up being maybe in the six to seven thousand dollar range and if they want a whole lot more and e-commerce and stuff it gets up to the ten to fifteen thousand dollar range and you have some leeway when you're doing it with somebody if you know that you're going to give them a break you can gear them to you don't want this or you don't want that so you can make it so after you practice it one of my clients one of my students calls me one day after her course session ended and she said oh my god I just priced a website for ninety seven thousand dollars I'm like what? how could that happen? did I do something wrong and then I realized there's no way any of that ninety seven hundred she said yeah ninety seven hundred and I said well did she know that your tongue was hanging out or how did you manage that? she said no she didn't see that because she was too busy bargaining me down to seventy five hundred and this was more than twice what she'd ever built a website for before and she was a good designer so I mean that's what happens when you get the confidence and you use the tools on the next level I mean I do nonprofits I sell church websites eighty nine thousand dollars they come in with a budget of two thousand but by the time I finish the conversation it's like you know but when you finish the conversation they know you are the best church website builder that they're going to find and they want you and that's what you have to have you have to have confidence with the user experience we're done with the user experience and stuff and a system so that they will think you were the best person to do their website and I'm telling you if you do these things you will be if they're getting two or three other bids you will be the best and you will be half agencies yes I'd be half two at length agencies for twenty three thousand dollar job because I'm new in the image yeah and a lot of people don't want to work with a big agency we just got one of the biggest portman holdings the biggest one of the biggest real estate development companies in the country and she found us online the assistant to the president found us online they were looking for a local company that wasn't a big agency she said you wouldn't leave the bad websites out there so I would and so she wanted us and she went to bat for us and we got the job so yeah okay thank you