 So, Mickey and I are going to talk to you about the process that we take to develop a website. We're not getting nitty-gritty into coding. We're going to say high level and just talk through the phases that we go through. A little bit about us. Mickey and I are the co-owners of Green Melon Media. We're an agency in Marietta. We've got a studio off the square, and most of our team is sitting right there, and I don't see the last member. But we're a team of five, and WordPress development is our core. Outside of that, we do print design, branding, messaging, SEO, some social management strategy as well. So we've been in business about six years now, and we actually host a meet-up called All Things WordPress in Marietta in the library. It's supposed to be the third Thursday. It bounces around a little bit. Lunchtime, the third Thursday of every month. We actually cover a lot of the things we're talking about today in more detail at that meet-up. So we'd love to have you guys. Yes, All Things WordPress. And there's, yeah, you can actually go to allthingswordpress.com and it'll redirect it. So our process that we use for web design isn't one that is necessarily universal. Certainly there's going to be different approaches. We're just going to share what we do. Freelancers might dive in a little bit more high level. Big agencies probably go even deeper. The process involves up to seven people sometimes. So it all depends on who you have on deck to help you out. So first, consider this quote. A well-trained man knows how to answer questions, and an educated man knows what questions are worth asking. So whenever we approach a website design, it's always about educating the client and not diving straight into design or diving straight into, what do you want it to look like? It's about asking the right questions and educating them. So many of you have probably been asked a lot of questions. How many of you are designers? Okay, awesome. Developers, a combination of the two? Awesome, awesome. So you guys are probably presented with a lot of questions from your clients quite often. So things like, you've never heard this. How much do your websites cost? And if you saw Jason Swank history, he has a good answer for that. If you ask them what their budget is and they say, well, we don't really have a budget, they don't want to be able to say, great! We can build a killer website with unlimited funds and new testing, and usually that will hone it back in. The better thing I like to raise is kind of a range. If someone has a budget and budget is their top concern, then GoDaddy has a plan for a dollar a month. You can build a website. So if you want to do a budget all the way down, going the other way you have people, if you were here at WordCamp a couple of years ago, Cody Benson from Georgia State did the keynote. They did their new website on WordPress. It was greater than a million dollars. Other sites, what do we have, B&Q, Home Depot in the UK, did a new website for 88 million dollars. The government built one for like two billion, and it's not any good. So really, the range can be all over. You can look at Wix, the Squarespace, and some of those for four bucks or eight bucks or free, and sometimes that's a good solution, but honing in on budget can be tough, and that question of course is hard to answer because I'm sure if we go around the room, really what we build sites for it varies, depending on what people need. The next question we get a lot, can you include a design prototype with the proposal, or give me a sketch of what we're going to do, and we say, no, we can't. Again, in some cases you can, it comes down to price. Go Daddy, the first thing you do is pick a theme, because you want to go, but back to Ali's quote, if you want to do it right, we believe in taking your time, thinking through the process of it. What needs to happen, what should the customers do, and laying it out, and we're going to walk through some of that. And in general, we feel the quicker you do design, the cheaper the site is, and the less effective, but cheaper too. Again, a Go Daddy for a dollar, you do design, it's cheap, maybe good, less effective. Further down, when we go through our process, design's not until step seven, really thinking through what's going on, another question, I need a website at the end of the month. And that's possible too, and I know some of you guys can do it that fast. In theory we could too, but again, to do it right, the way we want to do it, takes usually 12 weeks, maybe more depending on other features that come in. At times we try to say, okay, they really do need it in a month for this conference, let's just skip some steps and make it happen, and it just never goes as well. Things just aren't thought through, and pieces are missed. Again, there may be cases for it, but we really believe in following the process. We've built it over the years, and we like to trust the process. So we love what we do. People come to us with all sorts of ideas. They say, okay, here's what I want it to look like, or here's what I need to sell, here's what I need to put out there to the world. Great, there's certainly a million different ways we can do that, and a website is one of those. So we take those ideas that they come to us with, and we turn it into a strategy. And we're able to turn the conversation around and say, all right, let's start square one. Take it one piece at a time. So that's where we start. We say, okay guys, let's talk about your goals. Let's look at really what the goal of this website is and what we want to accomplish. So like I said, we're going to focus one step at a time and really dive in. The first thing that we do is discovery. How many of you have a discovery meeting with your clients? Yeah, I mean it's kind of a given, right? What questions do you ask? Who's doing the most talking? And that goes back to my quote, a well-educated man knows what questions to ask. So we start, we actually, before we even have a conversation with the client, we send them an online questionnaire. And it gives them a chance to write their thoughts down and really dig deep into what they're looking at executing and accomplishing on the site. So in this form, having this well thought out discussion gives us something to talk about during our discovery meeting to dig in deeper. So we talk about goals. We talk about their target audiences. Sometimes they say our audience is everybody. No, no, it's not. Then it's nobody. So that's a process we can go through as well. Let's narrow down your target audience and that's messaging strategy. Your competition, it's always good to do a competitive audit of other websites in the industry just to stay abreast of what is happening so we can make sure we're that much better. The features of the site are going to be, some people come to us with a wish list of features and that's okay. We'll consider those features and then we kind of step back, think through them and suggest the best execution to make it work. We had a meet-up last two weeks ago now. All things were a press meet-up where we actually dug really deep into these questions and you can go to our website or allthingswordpress.com and get those slides so you can see what questions that we ask. So the next step after we really regroup and Mickey and I parse through our notes and think through what are we going to do to accomplish this goal is we define the project. We really think through those features and spell it out into essentially a scope of work but we make sure the client agrees with us on that scope of work. It's a working document. It's something that we present to them and say this is our suggestion. If you went to Jason Blummer's talk or have read any of his books, he's got a really great suggestion for presenting this proposal of sorts. He always gives three options. One, it makes you your own competition. They're comparing you to you because you've given them options. It also gives them a range. This is our full, most robust solution that we really think is going to work for you. It might be over your budget but consider it because this is what we're suggesting to make it work. The second option might be something that's a little more scaled down and within their comfort zone. Might not be as robust and full featured as the first one. And the last one might be the you really need something. Here's what we can do for you for that baseline. So once we all agree on that project, on that scope, we can move on to actually collecting the assets that we need to do the job right. A lot of companies have a logo, an existing logo, or an existing style guide that we need to make sure we abide by. We like to collect inspiration not because we want to do what the client wants. They might have an idea of what the website looks like but they're going to turn to us for best practices there. But we don't want to disappoint. We want to at least get inside of their heads. So whether it's a magazine cut out that they like the colors on or another website, we want to see that to start really shaping what they see in their head to make sure that we can at least accomplish something and not disappoint. Hosting is another item that we always want to make sure is in place. And Mickey can talk a little bit about our beliefs there. Yeah, so for hosting, I've talked to a lot of you individually this week about how you host sites. Our philosophy personally is to let clients always host their site. We'll help them get it set up and let them pay for it, them own it. We'll take care of all the dirty work. We think that works out best for them. I've talked to some of you that host on behalf of your clients and have very good reasons for doing that. So again, I'm not going to say our way is best necessarily. We like working that way. Mostly we have our clients freedom. You know, we're in the middle of a project with a client right now. We've been a monk just trying to get access to their site because they didn't have control of it. The previous guy did. He has a job now and he's going to get to it eventually. And meanwhile, you know, you can't do anything about it. You know, the hosting, rightfully won't give anyone else access because it's his account. So we don't ever want to be that person. They're stuck with us because of that. But other folks, we talked to a guy last night. He hosts like 400 sites. So it's always on their platform because it's hard to deal with that many. So I mean, there's good reasons there as well. Claudia. Yes, so she's asking, do we walk them through it? Yes, we do. Depending on their needs. And a lot of them will come with hosting already. I already have an account with host gate or click host. Someone decent. I'm going to go with that. You know, there's site ground, dream host, you know, lots of decent hosts out there, you know, for depending on your budget, you move up to WP engines and others, depending what's going on. But I've even, like I talked to Carl Becker at Click Host a few years ago and said, hey, clients trying to sign up, but step two is confusing. Go change that a little bit to make it easier. And so now he has a number so I can tell clients, go to Click Host, click on the whatever option, then click number two on the next page and it makes it easier to go through. So yeah, because it is a tricky piece. I don't want to make them do work, but I want it in their name, their control, their credit card. And then I say, after you sign up, you're going to get an email full of gobbledygook you don't know about with FTP and IP addresses. Just send that to us and we'll deal with it. But then if they ever decide they don't like us and want to move on, they have control and can do their own thing. So, kind of our thoughts there. So now that we have everything that we need to really make this stuff start working, we dive into exactly what pages need to be on the site in order to accomplish their goals. And we talked about this a little bit earlier today at 9 a.m. The goal is the main overarching thought that you need to keep in your mind through this entire process. When a user comes to your site, what action needs to happen? What is the call to action? What does conversion mean? So coming up with a site map helps outline exactly what hierarchy of pages and actions are going to happen through the site. We outline these pages in a flow chart. And if you're doing keyword research, this is the phase where it really needs to start. A lot of those keywords need to be in your pages. And if you're able to define that list of keywords that you're going after, we can take that into account when creating the site map. We use a pretty cool tool called Slick Plan to do our site maps. This is an example of a site map. It looks kind of like a flow chart. We explain to our clients each little bubble, each little box is a page. We want to make sure at this point every single page is accounted for before we dig in. So there's no surprises down the road. And this is just part of really strategically thinking through what's going to be on the site. It also helps with content development and copywriting. Once we outline this flow chart, we know exactly where content's missing, what needs to be written, and the copywriter can say, okay, well, I've got 24 pages to write. Let's get started. It also helps the client, if the client's trying to really think through what pages need to be offered, what their services are. This is the time to really dig in and talk about that deeper. Let's see. We used to use Illustrator when doing site maps, just making little boxes and outlining it for them. Slick Plan has some really neat tools. You can add annotations for each page to say exactly what features need to be on that page, or an overview of the content that should be on that page. You can export it as a PDF, and that will keep those little notes in there so the client can approve a PDF rather than having to go and just slick plan and really poke around that way. So content, once the site map is defined, content is our next step. We know what to write now. So this is when we, it's not only, of course, keywords. We want to make sure those keywords are integrated into the content. Jenny Munn talked about that yesterday. She'll tell you every time any page that you write, you want to make sure those keywords are strategically placed through it. So that comes into account right now when we're working on copy. We also want to collect any images. At this point, sometimes people like to make a mood board to help create a catalog of images to use on the site that express that same feeling that communicates visually what the website's trying to accomplish. And video. We need to make sure that if there's any video to be included on the site, we need to know about it now so we can integrate it onto the pages correctly. And, of course, if you need to get video created, let's back up a little bit and get that done. So that's something that we would have talked about in the discovery process. Content is our biggest bottleneck personally. Whenever we're working on a website, if we don't have an experience, or if we don't have a copywriter, and the client's trying to provide content, it's undoubtedly going to be a bottleneck in our process. And we can end up waiting months for content because you think you can take on a full site map of pages and copy, and it ends up taking so much longer than you expect. So I do suggest investing in a good copywriter when doing your website. Jill was asking, how many times that we're asked, can you show me the design first so I can write copy around it? Which, yeah, I know. We could ask it too. A copywriter is really going to be able to work with you on creating that editorial strategy on the website, but when a client wants to see that, it's tough. We try to educate them on how the messaging is really going to impact the design. The headlines, I mean, headlines on each page is just as relevant as the design is itself. So if there's a headline about cats, we want to make sure that the design of the page is, you know, it's going to play off of each other. We love having copywriters in-house or artists right next door to our office because we can collaborate on that and do those internal meetings and kind of get on the same page together. It's tough when it's disjointed. You know, it is a challenge. Then I was going to say one other thing. You'll notice too that we're doing content. We haven't even gotten to design, development, all that stuff because this isn't going to be done now. This is going to start and sort of be going alongside as we work through the rest of the steps because it doesn't take a while. Oh, and one more thing for Jill. The next step is wireframing, right? After. Yeah, our next step is wireframing and that helps as well with content. If a page is going to be more graphically driven and more and more internal pages are not just content, there's going to be a bit of a second home page just to really get some of that information because anybody can land on any page of your site. So we tend to wireframe deeper into the site in order to layout. This is how we're seeing the content being laid out and that might help as well. And we'll get there in a second. So related to content, we picked this up, I think it was a couple of years ago here with Andrew Searles, but we used something called a content collector that we built, which is kind of cool. I know some of you want some more tools to build or to use and this is a neat idea. So what we have, we set up a WordPress multi-site, which in and of itself can be a little tricky. Your host can probably help you with that. In our case, it's greenmelon.cc. It's just a boring page if you pull it up. But we build a little multi-site for every client and that's where we can load the content. It's just a simple WordPress, no must, no fuss. They can load content into while we're building the real site. And what's neat is the way it works with SlickPlan. So Ally has her SlickPlan. She's drawing the bubbles in there and making notes. You can take SlickPlan and say export to WordPress, import that into our content collector and it automatically generates all the pages in the menu. It takes the notes from SlickPlan and puts them in the body of the pages. So then when the copywriter goes in, all the pages are laid out. Everyone has the notes and she can say, okay, there were the notes, the keywords. Start building them out. The site's being developed. When the site's done, we're already on a WordPress site, so we can do an export and then import that into the site and all our content is suddenly on the dev site that's about to go live. So... In need of formatting. In need of formatting. Yeah, it still needs to be cleaned up. Because again, it's bare bones there, but at least it saves us a lot of copying and pasting and setting up pages and that kind of stuff. It works pretty well. Is that your own plugin? Well, okay, yeah. It's not our own plugin. SlickPlan.com is the product we use there and they have the export tool to WordPress. WordPress Multi-Site, we had to set up a site for that, but it's a common, it's admittedly a little tricky to set up, but it's a common thing. You can talk to folks about that. So we set up our own WordPress Multi-Site, but there's already a plugin for SlickPlan to do the import into there. And then it's just the normal WordPress export out of one and import into our development site. We typically use Content Collector when we're working with the client to gather the content. A copywriter, we have a bit more of an internal process for accepting their files and everything. Mickey will send a screencast of walking through Content Collector and how to add content to a page. So the client understands, okay, I log in, click on pages, and I go to the page that I want to write content for and I dump my content there. Save, publish. It's not an indexed site, so it can just publish away, and that's just how we ask them to submit content to us. Because one of the issues, of course, we all have is they submit their content and they say, oh, but here's the change, reload it again. Oh, and they change this other word, reload it again. And so this way they can reload it to the heart's content until they say it's done and say good, it's done. Let's move it over, and that saves. Because we always tell people, send us final copy, and we all know that it doesn't happen, but this way they can do that. They can load their final copy and then load their final, final copy, and then final copy version 3, and they can do all that and it doesn't affect us. We can just move it over. Any other questions at this point? Awesome. Oh, yeah. Got you. Okay, so content collector is our word. We call it our content collector. SlickPlan just has it, they call it XML export, into any WordPress site, which happens to be into our content collector multi-site, and then run it over again. That was something we created. But the tools to make that happen are all freely available though. So now that we're kind of behind the scenes, we're working on content, that's going to keep on going behind the scenes. You know, it's not just right it up and it's done. So we're going to move on to architecture. We call it architecture because a lot of our clients don't understand the word wireframes, but this is wireframe. We had it as wireframing for such a long time, and every pitch that we ever did was essentially, well, here's what a wireframe is. So we call it architecture so we can explain that it's the blueprint that we draw before building the house. So you would never just start nailing together boards to build a house without having a plan. So this really helps us with usability and what I was talking about before with the site plan, thinking through the call to action and the best way to get there. So we do this specifically, not only to plan, but also to help the client make decisions without getting distracted by color and pictures and shapes. We just want them to see the bare bones of what we're thinking for the layout of each page so they can approve that and then we can wrap it in design. So we're getting close to design, but we're still planning. This really, the way I think of it, after I have my site plan laid out and I know the main goals and call to action, those are my puzzle pieces. And then I go in and I start arranging them in different ways and sketching and brainstorming, looking at other sites for inspiration until I come up with what I think is going to accomplish some conversion, a call to action. And I usually have two to three options, mostly for the home page and I'll present that first. And then the client can choose, I'm really liking how this one has the big headline at the top, but can we bring the video up too? And I let them kind of say, here's what I'm thinking and we offer our suggestions from there. So it helps them to envision how the site's going to look without completely seeing it in its full form yet. We use Illustrator and you can see an example of this is just our website, a bare bone wireframe of the home page. I use Illustrator, there's a lot of tools out there, there's Balsamic, Glyphy, yeah, there's a few that we've tried. I am very comfortable in Illustrator just with my background in print, so it's just what I go to. And this is what they'll see and we make sure we're getting headlines right. At this point I'd like the copywriter to start giving us some input on headlines and calls to action because I can start integrating them into our wireframe. So once the client chooses the wireframe that they like and we'll actually go on and build an internal wireframe depending on how complex the project is, we've done up to 20 wireframes, we then can start doing design. It's going to be an easier process now that we have the layout of the site. So we essentially color inside the lines or outside the lines or however you want to do it. And now the client knows what to expect. We've set expectations and when they start seeing it come together they get really excited. They see, oh, now I see why we went from here to here to here to design. We give the client a chance to review the design. Of course there's a revision process here just like there is on every other step that we've gone through to make any necessary changes before we move on to development. So yeah, development. So we've gone this far and they still have nothing technically resembling a website at all, just some pictures and layouts and stuff. So it's time to get started digging in. And again, this could be a whole day talk in and of itself and I'm sure you've been to some other presentations on frameworks and development practices and I don't want to get into that too much. Personally, we use the Genesis Framework, StudioPress, those folks. That's more little tech heavy if you want to really design it. There's others like Divi that are more drag and drop, depending where your skills are, that kind of thing. Other frameworks you guys like to use for sites? Nobody? What's that? Thesis, yeah, thesis is a popular one. Other developers might use bootstraps, something like that. But again, that's sort of inconsequential to talk but we've used Genesis for that. Yeah, and get going through there. Once it's developed to a point, we put it up on a staging server. This will depend on whether they already have a site or not. If they haven't had a website before, we'll go ahead and put it on their real site with a coming soon page on it. And I usually let Google go ahead and index that because all Google sees the main home page but can start getting a little bit of juice going there. If they already have an existing site, we'll put it on a test server with a different domain name until Google will stay away. We don't want to mess up their rankings in the meantime. But wherever it is, we go in and start playing. I was going to mention on the coming soon page, we talked about this in the earlier session, but we use a plugin called Ultimate Coming Soon Page, which works well for that. What's it needs? You can build a little coming soon page and if anyone's logged into the site, they don't see it. It's just a normal site with a home page and everything. Anyone that's not logged in, which is everyone else, they just see the coming soon page. So it works well. The client can log in and it just works just like the final site will except no one else can see it. But wherever it is, at that point, it's time to start playing with it. There's a plugin called Viewport Resizer on Chrome that you can use just to kind of test different mobile sizes. Thumbs up in the back for that. It is a good little plugin, Ashley told, shared with us a while ago. You still want to test it on as many mobile devices as you can because the size of an iPhone is not always exactly the same as how an iPhone will treat it. Different browsers. I happen to use Windows, which is very helpful at this point because I have Internet Explorer, which hate it, which we all do. A lot of people still use it, so you have to be able to test on that. Sure. The plugin, I believe, is called Viewport Resizer. It's a Chrome extension. Yeah. Do you use Google Chrome as your browser extension? I don't think it's built into developer tools now. There are some pieces like that, but this one just puts a little bar right at the top so it will click through. There's a Firefox developer edition that has more stuff built in. That could be it. Was there another question? I saw? Yeah. Yeah. And so we kind of work through from there. Again, just testing, trying all the browsers, making it work. Using Genesis, there's a cool plugin called the Genesis Visual Hook Guide. Genesis has lots of hooks. It's kind of a geeky way to insert code different places. And it's hard to tell. They'll have all these hooks. You're like, where on earth will this one, you know, Genesis Afterheader, where does that show up? If you enable this plugin, it just makes your site ugly and puts all the names of the hooks everywhere. It's just going to go perfect. Go add the hook and work it in. But there's a lot of different plugins that can help with testing and development at that point. But that's some of what we've got there. So it's been tested, reviewed, everything's good. It's time to launch. We launch. Again, if this is a new site, we have that coming soon page. It's essentially just turn that off and the site becomes live for everyone. If it's not a staging server and they have an existing site, it's a whole different animal. Essentially what we do is move it on top of the old site and then make sure the redirects set up for all the old pages. If they have about that HTML for their old page and now it's just slash about, you want to make sure Google and visitors get the redirects. There's a plugin called Redirection. Very simply Redirection that works well for that. If you have a small site, what I often will do is as soon as we launch, I'll do a Google search for that site and just open up all the pages which will all say 404 not found and then go to the Redirection plugin and say that one goes there, that one goes there, that one goes there and that one goes there. It takes seconds to do. If you have a site, a more traffic site, you have to build all that stuff ahead of time. You have to take a little more finesse to make it work. But launching our site, we have a checklist. We have slides from that from our meetup back in December. A lot of these were kind of blowing through so we've been using our meetup to kind of cover in-depth some sections of it. Next month is going to be the wireframes and site maps for a longer stretch. But we have slides from December where we walk through our checklist for launching a site. We have 28 steps we go through and they're all pretty easy but make sure if it was on a test server we would say, Google, come on in. A lot of us have seen clients that accidentally left that one little silly check box checked that blocked Google completely from their site which is so bad and so simple but so easy to overlook because it's buried back in the settings. So we have a checklist we go through every time just to say, yeah, it's already cut off and just make sure we don't miss anything. And again, we've shared that checklist online. There's a good book that came out like the best marketing checklist ever that has checklists for all kinds of things. We're big believers in that. We're alive. This is essentially done. The site is up. We still have a few more things we like to go through though. We like to educate and train our clients. We believe in education. We're here in the meetup and that kind of thing. But even clients if they don't care about WordPress we like to train them to the extent at least they know what they have. And only people just to say just we hope it works and if they want us to handle everything for them that's great. We're happy to but I still want to sit them down for a little while and say, here's how it works. Here's how you add pages. Here's how we add posts. They can understand oh, if you want to add a post it's real hard. And so just to get them understanding of what's going on but of course most clients want to just run it themselves afterwards which is great and so we're happy to educate on that and make that happen. Usually we do those in person. We do a lot of screencasts and that kind of thing but majority of our clients are local and so we'll set just some time just to sit down with them and their team to walk through how WordPress works and you know a condensed version of the beginner workshop from Friday with better Wi-Fi hopefully. That was fun. Lastly, our improvements. WordPress has a big update come out every month or so not as much lately but often security updates on top of plugins that aren't always pushed out. We need to make sure people are staying updated somehow. Whether they do it themselves whether they use us whether they use another service it happens so we really stress that with people what do they need going on. We use a tool called Infinite WP to manage a whole bunch of sites at once. It's a pretty cool tool. The main WP folks are here. They have a great tool for that. IThemes has a tool called IThemes Sync. These are all tools if you have a bunch of sites to manage you can kind of look at them in one dashboard and work through instead of having to log in to each one see what's going on. Manage WP is one of the oldest probably one of the best but one of the most expensive. In our case they would have been like 600 bucks a month to use which is a lot to swallow for that but it's easy Infinite WP that we use you have to download it and install it on your own server and set it up it's a little more finicky I have solutions like Code Guard if you need backups backup buddy just make sure all that stuff is in place if you just let a WordPress site sit SEO is going to be not so good if you're not updating regularly but you're going to get hacked at some point we like to make sure people are set one way or another whether it's on their own through us through someone else it's an important piece just not to launch it and walk away then of course we can help with new content and features Google Analytics we always set up Google Analytics I went to this conference and learned about Google Analytics I want to see mine and it's nice to say well we already had that set up here six months and they can dig in and look at data and stuff then talk about other ways they may want to promote their new site social media newsletters lots of different stuff like that so at that point we're essentially done there's a site for the world to see and like I said not all agencies use this process I know that there's larger agencies that do more of a team a pod kind of theory where they literally talk about the size of ours dedicated to a single client you know that's large scale and then there's freelancers that it's just them and you know it's a lot to take on but any adaption of this to really think through the strategy before getting to design and ultimately development is a wise choice so we are at GreenMellonMedia.com and you can find some of those meetup slides that we reference at allthingswordpress.com we're happy to take questions getting license how do you think that gotcha so on some of those like gravity forms we'll have that in their name for them to take care of frankly we have very few that don't have us handling updates and we have the developer license for Genesis we have it indefinitely but yeah to the extent possible if we are going to hand it off as much as we can in their name to take care of you know and a lot of clients we use woofoo for the forms which works well has good and bad if they want to put in there if they want to go somewhere else to save them some cost that's certainly something to be thinking about as you have premium themes and plugins and making sure it's in their name good question all right so standard plugins that we use on all the sites not many I try to keep it as little as possible we usually end up with eight or ten it certainly varies wildly but a Kismet on almost every site because we do encourage people to blog and hopefully take comments on their site that helps block spam there's one called push press I like to use post it immediately notifies Google of it just another way to let Google know doesn't help you rank better per se but when you get yeah hopefully index quicker I'm a big believer not worrying about people stealing your content it is wrong it's unethical I don't recommend you do it but I see people spend way too much time chasing all that down as long as you can be the authoritative copy of a post if people copy it twenty times you still rank first that's cool that plugin helps with that a little bit just to say hey Google help with that we use jetpack most of the time not always but again it has a lot of great features it enhances commenting it has some cool things for people when you receive email notifications of comments as a user I love going on another site to leave a comment having a checkbox that says email me when someone else replies because I'd like to start conversations but I'm not going to remember to go back later and see so as a designer as a building a site I want that checkbox there jetpack has a number of cool features in there that help DM block bots if any of you are in analytics you probably see SE malt and buttons for website and all that stuff that blocks all those things it's a tiny little ten line plugin we added just to block all that kind of stuff from Google analytics WordPress SEO by Yoast there's a talk issue we load that again virtually every time that's probably about it for every time again there's others we'll add often but I don't want to say here's just the blanket plugins unique that vary so much from case to case so hope that helps yeah okay so she's asking project management tools for managing tasks and actually I just wrote a big blog post on our site about this a couple days ago a few years ago we used one called Nozbe and OZBE which I know the click host what's that many years ago I know the click host folks do use it was a great product nothing but good things to say about it we switched to Asana about three years ago and that's where I think a lot of people should be Asana's phenomenal just had a few shortcomings we got a little too big for them and now we're using one called teamwork.com we have killer missing holes recurring tasks is the main one for us somehow at base camp you can't say every Monday do this you have to use external stuff and silly so teamwork.com is what we use and again I have a big post on our site explaining why we like that over Asana and hopefully I tried to write in a way where people would say well that means I still like Asana better because it is the biggest catch I guess Asana is free for pretty much anyone in here I think you have to be over 30 users to pay oh greenmailingmedia.com everything you find on our site yes just go there to the blog we have alley slides I think are the first posts and a few down talking about teamwork yeah okay good question so how do you adapt your process when it's time for a redesign and refresh to a large degree we don't typically if they need a redesign it's been years and it really is time to sit back and think through the whole process again it makes some steps easier they already have a site map in place we usually start with that we'll put that into slick plans and now is the time to let's move this and expand this category but you don't need this page anymore and now we need copywriting done in these new pages and refresh it and we want to give them a fresh layout and so to a large degree it doesn't change much again it can go a little quicker perhaps but we try not to again if we assume all the copy is good from before well maybe maybe not you know SEO might not be good so it's worth taking a whole fresh look at it okay what do we put on our contract for training and maintenance we put in with every site we build two hours of training is included we'll go to them so that can be on their computers with their team and show them depending what they need we may put in four hours instead if we think they want to know more and usually I say that I go there with a list I have a list of what we go through in WordPress but I say this is your time we'll talk about WordPress but if you want to talk about analytics sometimes we get into talking about teamwork in Asana I mean it's really whatever they want to learn from us there and then ongoing and then if they need extra help each month and they get into newsletters and other those are all custom we kind of just talk through it with them and see what needs to happen then they're not our clients I mean because again they don't need us they're not going to pay what they need to pay for a site they need to use a Wix or something else they just want to throw a site up and that's okay people don't always have the time or budget to do it what we consider the right way and so we'll talk to other folks Cliff Seal and Kyle have a product not thinking through everything but we know it's on a good solid platform they use Genesis does a good job there so yeah we just kind of talk through what their other options might be then because that's not what we want to do okay so a Kismet yeah to use a Kismet for anti-spam you need a key and they kind of hide if you go to say I need a key you can get it for free but they say pay five bucks for it and you kind of slide it to free if you want we slid it up like 50 bucks a month we pay just because I want to give back to that and we do use it quite a personal site you can go in when you get the key it's going to say pay for it and you can slide it and make it free but if you're doing a business I certainly encourage you to toss them a couple bucks a month because it is a great plug-in to block spam we just take care of that yeah we just use the one key I believe it's acceptable someone can correct me if I'm wrong but we're paying for the one key I think we're paying enough and we just use it for all our clients you know so other questions design she's you're asking what we use to design the site once the wireframe's done yes still presenting layouts good question we do still use Photoshop to design a lot of people design in the browser that's okay too if you are a designer and developer you might be comfortable doing that we take that wireframe that's I've done an illustrator we move it over to Photoshop and we literally start you know filling it in so yes there's certainly different ways you can do some people who have designed sites an illustrator if it's going to be a very cartoon animated site so different tools right and that's that's more during the testing phase where we'll actually see it all come to life we when we have more complex projects sometimes we overlap design and development a bit so that they can see here's the home page and here's how it would work animation or right yes and we can show that in sometimes we'll explain it sometimes I even put little notations in the PDF say this is going to do this action and the the thing that's what you can actually do a whole document about exactly what actions are going to happen on the website we don't do that but I know agencies that too I was going to say one other piece that once the wireframe is done design begins but really development can start to begin at that point because we know it's going to start getting laid out so once the design is done we can roll it in depending on our workload and stuff but yeah we'll do that sometimes too yeah envision for design okay envision is what he's saying we've not used that I'm not familiar with it but certainly we're looking at cool others okay our philosophy about video on the home page yeah I think the one is I don't like pop ups for the most part there are tasteful ways we heard in the keynote when we pop up or whatever but video I don't like to pop up and I never auto play I mean we have some sites where at the top they have a beautiful video so we feature it right on top of the home page if that's a big call to action but I never like it to auto play mostly for user behavior if someone's at work sneaking around trying to look at your resort or whatever and the music starts they don't look for the pause they just X out of the browser and they're gone maybe never to come back so it's just annoying and I do the same thing you know sure yeah there we go there's a lot of things where clients don't always get in the head of their users they say we want to pop up and annoy them and get them but they hate that when other sites do it you gotta think what would the clients actually want to see and a large video if it's gonna attract attention if people want to play it they will and if they don't want to then you would have annoyed them even more otherwise so did you have a question favorite caching plug-in often is none we don't always cache every site a lot of our clients just don't get that much traffic and caching is gonna break more things there's a number of decent ones out there we'll use on bigger sites but it's more of a case-by-case but not not consistently again especially if a client is gonna be managing it later there's too many things that can blow up Cliff Seals talk yesterday talked about ways to hide a lot of that from them which would help a little bit so they're not playing with the settings and enhancing it for us but yeah again a lot of our clients they'll get 50, 100 visits a day it's not gonna make a big difference it's more more hassle than it's anyone else? I actually want to talk a little bit more about that and the types of customers that are okay so hacking yes so yeah so WordPress being the most popular in the world has hackers always trying to attack it because they can find a hole in they suddenly have a hole to 73 million sites or whatever over Christmas for example there was a revolution slider had a hole in it something where around 150,000 sites got hacked I mean hackers will do their best to get into your site and then usually do their best to disguise that they got in they'll just slip little viagra links in and do things and you'll see your traffic tailing off and not know why but WordPress comes out with updates very frequently to combat that WordPress SEO had a pretty decent security hole last week they fixed we just encourage clients just to keep it secure in our case we keep it secure we keep plugins updated we still do a malware scan every week we still we use iThemes security for an extra security plugin WordPress does a good job security does a good job there's a lot of good security plugins we get something in place to protect it further which theoretically you don't need if you're updated but you never know always an extra layer of defense and then again we do a weekly malware scan InfiniteWP has a feature where it'll scan we can say scan all of our sites it'll run through and tell us what's going on yeah and yeah we keep uptime monitoring on too that was one I didn't mention there's uptime robots you can set that up for free and say check my site every five minutes if it goes down text me or email me or whatever that one's pretty cool I switched away from that one so the site went down just for a second it would text me so I got a lot of text and started to tune them out so we use one now called port-monitor which I can say check it every five minutes if it goes down three times in a row then text me because now there's really a problem so I get far fewer texts but they're much more urgent I know something's going on again it's the kind of thing a host probably is taking care of but you know maybe it's something a plugin update something with sideways and no one noticed so you know I want to know about something down before talking to security that's a whole bigger issue we've talked to any of the hosts out there they can certainly speak more to why they're just the most secure platform and what they do so here's out but enjoy lunch thank you guys