 Thank you. I won't stand over there. Yeah. Hello My name is Ross Welcome to WordCamp Edinburgh as well. We're an Edinburgh based WordPress agency So it's fantastic that you guys are all here at our home WordCamp Can Everybody hear me okay first of all. Yeah, and if you want to follow along on your own device My slides are here D33.io For slash WC-ed in just in case you need that. That's cool. So Tails from the edge right when I thought about a title for this talk I thought I should give it something dramatic because it's been a dramatic journey that Jason and I have been on and well Things can't have been that bad can they? well, I thought I'd start off with a Statistics and immediately lose visual on the projector and if I give this cord a wiggle It's gonna come back on. I believe this happened earlier on as well. Fantastic Okay, somebody tell me if we get a signal. Yeah, no dice Fantastic, I'll let you fiddle around with that. Oh literally everything's gone off. Oh, okay Okay, right Joe's gonna get the captions back up and running, but I think I'll push on and Things can't have been that bad. Can they? Well, I looked at a statistic Just as was putting these slides together and I'm just gonna read out 38% There's been a 38% rise in the number of business insolvency appointments during the first quarter of 2018 over 2017 figures So that's almost a 40% rise and the number of businesses having trouble the number of businesses not having enough money to pay the bills and I Actually think that's quite an alarming increase if you read the whole article Maybe that is a bit of a scary statistic to start with but Yeah, it it's been tough I think and I think if you're doing well at the moment then you should be really proud of yourself because Trading conditions we found would be tough. We're having to work a lot harder for the business now We've been in business for almost as long as this projector. I think it's been around Okay Try again Only the best Come on Put it flicker. I'm gonna keep wiggling things around just until Yeah, it's plugged into the wall. I know we had issues with that earlier on No Come on. I will not be beaten by technology. Yeah, I'm past Yeah, yeah, okay Yeah, yeah, how many WordPress people does it take to fix a projector? Right? Yeah Okay, I think we're gonna get a different laptop. Yeah. Thanks, man. Nice one. There we go. Okay, right Let's push on Joe. You're gonna have to stand there It has been a bit of a journey, right and I've been working with WordPress for 10 years I've been running an agency for seven and yeah, I could tell you about the time we were fined by 500pixels.com for using an unlicensed image on a production website Yeah, happened by accident, but we put our hands up to it and paid the fine at that point in time if it had been Three images, ten images that had made it onto a production website It would have sunk my agency because we wouldn't have had the money to be able to pay the fine I could tell you about the time a client that we thought was really nice and really good to work with ripped us off 4,000 pounds I don't know if anyone else can identify with that in the room today But yeah, when it happened It was a crushing blow and we had to learn from it and move forward Or I could tell you about the time that we were down to our last 100 quid and the bank account and wondering What are we going to do next week? How are we going to get over this hump? But I'm delighted to say that yeah, we are still here, but It has been a bit of a roller coaster. I'm just gonna let this next slide load because it doesn't look like it loaded there Yeah, there we go and I have definitely been That person in the front and that person at the back as well, okay Celebrating the highs but also absolutely terrified So the intention of my talk today is really to avoid you having to shed tears that I have shed and This is just kind of stuff that worked for us. Okay, it might not work for you But this is how we did it. This is how we built a WordPress agency and this is what we concentrate on today so Five sections people process pricing practice and party. Okay, I'm just gonna dive straight into people That's the guy that I work with. Where are you? Put your hand up. Love you, man Jason and I have known each other for a long time and we've worked together for a long time So I'm not just in WordPress previously and not just in an agency Set up, but I read this quote and I thought I'm gonna have to include that So surround yourself with people who make you happy. It's incredibly important It's incredibly important that you enjoy what you do and that you enjoy the people that you interact with every single day And I'm not saying that life is like that every day in our office Do you know what 85% of the time I would say it is we have great fun and we love what we do It's not always been like that. Here's a chart representing Who did everything when my business first started? It was me. I did everything Then it looked like that Jason and I Sitting across the desk. Have you finished with that CSS file mate? Yeah, cool. Right. Let's move on. We'll do some terms for brilliant Today it looks like that. So there are five of us in design 33 myself Jason, Danny, Loic and Lorraine on this graph I don't think it accurately portrays the amount of work that I do because it only says However, when we break that down into a WordPress capacity, we've got maybe the Headings here are potentially in a slightly wrong order, but we've got accounting client handling. We've got creative We've got front end. We've got backend dev and we've got compliance and accessibility all inside our own agency and We also work with the range of freelancers so We work with freelance designers freelance seo people copywriters devs and people that do marketing and ppc but for us Fit is just as important as ability. Okay, so if you're a designer I would expect you to be able to open up sketch and design me something that looks nice All right, if you're a dev I would expect you to be able to solve a hard problem with some code And you know write it elegantly and adhere to standards that we would expect so That's all almost a given for us. It's more about the fit is this person going to Contribute to our team and help us grow as a business but It also applies to clients as well. All right, and this is really important for us. Okay We have to meet our clients and check that they fit with us Okay, and I think this is a singularly important thing that gets overlooked a lot of the time Client dangles a few grand in front of your nose and you jump at it Okay, without doing any checks to see if this is actually going to be a good fit So, how do we do that? Well, it's very simple. We meet them first of all, but then we think about working with them and we Check to see if they're going to take any of these boxes. Are they going to be fun? Life's too short. Okay I like to enjoy what I do. So is this client going to be fun to work with? Are they going to bring us fame? Can we ride on their coattails as they go and achieve these stellar things that they've set out to do? Can we get a bit of that? Are they going to make us more famous as an agency? Or let's be blunt about it Have they got a lot of money to spend because actually if I'm going to have to field phone calls over the weekends Then I want to know that it's worth it. And actually there's income coming into the agency. So We check the fit. Okay, so that's people the people around you whether you're a freelancer Whether you run your own agency check the fit of the people around you But also check the fit of the clients that you're working with because it's hugely important. So Second thing on my list was process Come on There we go, right. Oh, oh, it's going to skip ahead five slides now Okay, this is a company that we started working with this year. It's been quite a big project for us And I'm going to use these guys as an example To talk about our process that we work through internally at the 1933. This is Ediston everybody meet Ediston This is what they used to look like. Um, I grabbed this image of the web archive the way back machine I'm pretty sure you could see the rest of this photo at some point But this is what it looks like now on the web archive They make houses so currently they're developing 250 new houses in Sockee in central scotland They build houses essentially for families to to move into and what did we do with them? Well We took them through a full rebrand. You were able to see it for a second there and it was like awesome. Um, come on Yes, thank you So, yeah, I'm going to keep talking. Um, we built them a responsive website a responsive website and Crucially, it had to be easy to use. Okay, that was one of the the kind of key functional requirements that a non-technical Back-end team had to be able to add new houses new properties to the to the front end of the website They had to be able to add special offers, you know, so free carpets with this one or Helped to buy information all of that sort of information had to be readily available And we took them through a bit of a process that we use that we've honed over the years to really I suppose get the best out of the project and How do we do that? How do we get from client sign-on to finished project? I think so, okay, we'll give it a second. So we've got four steps to our our Our process and they all begin with D which is nice. So we've got discovery design development and deployment and discovery Is coming up next Are we there yet? Okay discovery Starts when the client Has signed the paperwork and if you're not using paperwork then stop what you're doing and go and get a contract document made up Pay a lawyer to legalify it and make it binding. Okay, and if you're not doing that do that now do that today It's incredibly important that we have a clear Vision for the project right at the start that the client understands What's going to happen when it's going to happen how much things are going to cost and crucially at this point We also take a payment. Okay, and that is Hugely important. We normally ask for 50 percent of the project fee up front. Okay, so in Edison's case We did exactly that and we found that that carries the mind that sharpens everybody's focus because money's changed hands. All right um We find that that Tact works very well. How are we doing jace? Not good Um, and then we get into some workshops with our clients So with these guys we were branding them. So what that means for us is we're looking at color schemes We're looking at typography. We're looking at users. We're looking at all these things And we have a bit of a process that I would love to show you. Um, if we can Yes, uh d33.io Forward slash wp edin. I'm so glad I put the slides up there. Yeah Okay, and we're on slide number 35 Uh, wc edin. Yeah, sorry. Good man. Thank you. Oh, that sounded final Yeah, d33.io forward slash Wc edin. It's a pdf. We should be able to download it from there. Um, and Come on, man. Come on Yeah, we're struggling struggling. Okay, right. Let's keep going. So um, I'm on slide number 35, which is manifesto and Some personas. So we take our clients through and in Ediston's case We took them through a bit of a journey And understanding who they are and understanding who their users are as well. Okay, so Why do we do that? Well, we need to we need to understand what the website has to do in this case Yeah, it's pretty simple. It's going to sell houses, right? But there's going to be a journey through the website for each user So we need to understand who those users are and the only way that we can do that Or the easiest way that we find to do it is to workshop with our clients draw all of that information out and We output a website at the end of this. It's a discovery site and it has all of the clients discovery work on there. So That means that if we're working with a designer, the designer can reference back to the discovery site The client can go. Oh, yeah. Who is the persona type that was the uh, you know, the uh, proud Divorcing or you know that kind of thing they can go back and they can they can look at the persona type Um, so we find that that works very well. Then we move into design now Our design process is not Set in stone Jason you're looking hopeful here Yeah, yeah, yeah And it's worthwhile reminding our clients and I always say this that you might not fall in love with our designs right away Okay, you might look at them and think I'm not sure about this And really it would be good to have some slides because the next few slides are pretty visual because we're talking about design, right? So, uh Come on. We can do it. We can do it. Oh Oh, it's thinking Yes, oh Nobody breathe Come on That's progress I think if this isn't going to work. We should just Sack it And uh, maybe we can you hook me into the tv instead? That's it the betterment of the captions Say again All right. Okay. Yeah, nice one. Okay, cool, right. So Uh, where do we go to? Okay. You might not fall in love right away. Um Yeah, and at this point we start to iterate designs pretty quickly. Okay So you can see here. We've got some various different visual Roots for uh, Edison's logo Edison's typeface. They're their wordmark Um, and we start to work through bits of the website Okay, and I'll come back to why in a second, but here's a homepage design that didn't quite make the cut Here's another completely different route. Um that we took that was felt not to be just quite right for Edison We'll start to mock up bits of the website as I said, so this is a call to action panel Encouraging customers if they've got questions to get in touch with Edison By either phone or by email and here's the footer of the finished website Why are we designing little bits of things? Well, what we found that it means is that when we get to The final iteration of the website. So here is the sketch file that actually made it to production The client already knows what they're getting. All right, they've already seen the colors. They've already seen the typeface There's no grand Unveiling and you wait with baited breath to see if they like it or not, you know there's none of that and It helps our clients feel more more involved in the process It helps our clients feel that they are taking decisions throughout the design process and there's constant feedback for our designers to Learn from and to iterate new Versions of the design. So at this point, we take a payment as well. So clients clients happy Let's take a payment. Let's get some more cash into the agency. Okay Why do we take stage payments? Well, I suppose it just helps us Have a bit of cash flow in the business first of all, but there might be costs involved with this You you might be working with an external designer or freelancers. So you've got to pay them, right? So staged payments taken payments at different stages throughout the project really really helps you Manage that and you're not having to think where you know, where on earth am I going to get the money to pay the designer from? That's fine. The client's going to give you it at the right point. Okay, so What do we do next? Well into development and We've got signed off visuals We then make them in a browser. I think that is pretty A simple way of putting it but we work with staging sites like this one. So behind a password Where our clients can log in and see our progress as we're as we're working through the the build process and once we get to the stage that we have In a browser visually the same representation as the signed off mock-ups We take another payment at that point. Okay now You guys might do something different. This is just how we do it. Okay, so we might mock up Three key pages say I held up four fingers there, but I said three four right we might do four Once we get to that point We kind of know how to build out the rest of the site because we know what the header in the footer looks like We know what an h1 and h2 and h3 looks like we know what hero sections look like and forms look like So we can kind of build out the rest of the site without too much more input from a designer now We found that that approach works very well and once we get to here We take a payment and the client Feedback that we get from this process seems to indicate that they like this bit too Because they can actually see the designs come to life They can see the rollover effects that we're using on buttons or how form interactions work and our development process has Uh I think it's safe to say evolved over the years and uh, yeah, I think like most of you we we started out with ftp Um, and then we kind of rolled forward into version control with git and yeah nowadays were continuous integration with jenkins Um, jason understands this bit much better than I do that's his job. Um So we are deploying to the web. Uh, we're getting ready to deploy and what do we have to think about? Well, this is a bit that a lot of people get wrong Um, we need to think about 301 redirects. We need to think about are we uh, is this a new domain or are we redirecting from an old Domain what's going to happen to all the old urls Uh, do we need to tell google about any of this? Are we using analytics? Are we using anything a bit more kind of, you know out there hot jar lead forensics or anything like that? You know, what are we doing? Um, are there any complicated dns changes that we need to think about just now for example? Are we going to break ediston's email if we uh, if we mess things up at this stage? So quite a quite a tricky part of a project But we have a trail list that we go through a kind of pre-flight list if you like That's always grown. It's always getting bigger and being refined as we go The whole process with us takes about nine to 12 weeks and yeah I mean it does depend on the project. Sometimes we go quicker. Sometimes we are Slower depends on the client anybody had slow clients before. Hey, right? Yeah, you know, I'll give you that copy by friday. Yeah And I think really the Important thing to remember here is if you're going to use stage payments, then It's good to think about that Do you know that there are going to be a slow client? If you do then you should maybe look at where you put your payment stages So that you're not running into a dry spell of money from their from their project So think about that in advance and that leads me on to number three, which is pricing. Normally every other talk that I've been to whether it's a word camp or another Tech talk when you when you start talking about pricing this happens I'm not telling you nobody's going to talk about it, right? Particularly. I have to say shock horror with word camps Okay, um, but I run a business. I need to make money and it's an important part of what we do And getting our pricing strategy, right took a long time. Okay How do you do that? Okay, so here's the the kind of party Charge that normally falls to me to write the proposals to go to meetings to Write documentation to do the search all of that has value Okay, and if you're not charging for that then you're missing a trick because you're giving your time away for nothing All right, and I don't know about you, but my time is valuable. I could be doing one of the other two things here Unfortunately as part of project work, there's quite a lot of paperwork that goes into the the projects that we work on there's quite a lot of reading and Understanding brief documents, you know, we have to really understand these things when we're giving them So we charge for all of that project management. We charge for it build it into your costs Um, I promise you it's a good thing to do. It's not just about design and development. There are Other other things to think about Who's heard of this value-based pricing? Yeah, you're nodding. Yeah, I know you have. Yeah Okay, value-based pricing is something that we have Tried in the past. We've never really got it right and I'd be interested to hear from anybody that has Let me give you an example. So Really really near the start of of design 33's kind of I suppose incarnation We started working with an Edinburgh legal firm quite a prestigious one. They're about 350 years old I remember sitting in their boardroom thinking how did I end up here? This is incredible And they had a system whereby they need to produce legal certificates If you've ever bought and sold a house in Scotland, your solicitor will have had one of these certificates called a property inquiry certificate They charge 85 quids each for them. Um, and the process that we walked into was this manual process, right? So person in the office generates the document then puts the client details into it then puts the logo on it Then make sure it's got the right date and the right stuff in the footer Right it's taken far too long. So and they do a lot of these they do a lot of these So we were asked to build a system that would help improve that workflow. So it's going to be ip restricted It's not publicly accessible. It's just for the client. So that kind of cuts down on, you know, it doesn't have to look snazzy It can be very simple and essentially User enters the data Some magic happens and then a branded pdf is spat out at the other end in reality It was a WordPress site with gravity forms on the side that the staff could see Gravity pdf. I'm pretty sure it's the name of the plugin that handles the data input from the form and then it spits out the pdf at the other end They were like, this is amazing guys. This is incredible You know, it's gone from needing four members of staff to do this to one, you know, fantastic. So When I was putting these slides together For wordCamp, I looked and to date as of the 8th of November, they've generated 19,146 certificates. Okay, who remembers how much they were charging their 85 quid each Okay, so currently as of the 8th of November, they have put through 1,627,410 pounds Through our system, right in anybody's books. That's a lot of money. Okay Should we have charged more? Yes. Should we have used value based pricing? Yes We got it wrong. We didn't see the inherent value We didn't understand it because we didn't take them through a process to help us understand What they were going to do with this and just how lucrative it was if you Buy me a beer later. I'll tell you how much we charged for them For the build, but we should have charged a lot more money. Okay We've talked about people we've talked about process we've talked about pricing and we've had some Technical issues in between practice, right? I want you to meet somebody. This is Emily Emily's eight. She's my youngest daughter and she's learning to play the cornet Anybody else here have kids that play brass instruments? I feel your pain Yeah, um, I said to her the other day and she's fantastic. She's really picking up and it's great I said to her the other day Do you know what honey practice makes perfect and quick as a flash? She came back and said no dad Practice doesn't make perfect practice makes progress and I thought That's good. Yeah, I'm having that right. So practice makes progress and I don't want to sound all preachy But there's no substitute for practice and all of the the agency Stuff that Jason and I do whether we are talking to people We're talking to potential employees or potential clients Whether we are thinking about our process whether we're thinking about how we how we actually complete our project Work or whether we're looking at our pricing. Why didn't we win that piece of work? We were too expensive, right? We need to practice that but again, we need to practice. There is no substitute for practicing how we handle our people how we interact with our clients our process should be Constantly being refined and we should also go back and re-examine our pricing A lot of a lot as well. Okay party, right Why is this in here? Well, I thought I had to kind of have five and then I there's a bit of a tenuous link in here as well So forgive me. Um, we do like to party at design 33 is anybody knows us. I'm sure we'll testify to Uh, this was our agency seventh birthday last week An escape room. That's Jason and I mountain biking and Glen tress last year We do like to have fun together and this is going to tie it back to what I said right at the start We do like to have fun and party a lot, but enjoy what we do This is us at word camp Europe last year and here comes the tenuous link. I think what I get most out of working in a word press agency is I get the opportunity to participate Um, I I mean that sincerely. I think uh, I've done a I've done a number of different jobs in my time And I definitely enjoy running my agency. Um, it's been hard. It's been hard work And the 10 years that I've been using wordpress. It's changed a lot and it's been hard. It's not always been easy, but We're really lucky. We work in an open source community. We get to learn from each other and we get to continually improve the products we work with Um, that's kind of it. Thanks for being with me through the the technical stuff. Yeah Brilliant. Yeah, thanks very much. Thanks. Do we have any questions for Ross? Yes That's a good question. No, we'll build it into our project fee So we tend to charge on a project by project basis. So um Sometimes we get request for proposals in or tender documents in and there is a fee attached to that You know that that happens sometimes doesn't happen always sometimes it can be quite a good way of Uh, I suppose getting a bit more information out of your client as well. So, um, if you can phone up the client and say How much is the the tender fee until I would do there isn't one I know I haven't indicated a budget either, you know My financial director is going to give me in the neck if I don't go back to some information You know, can you tell me how much the budget is? You know, then I suppose it's maybe a route to opening up a conversation You know, um, we build it in when we know, uh, if we're successful then, you know This project is going to take this amount of hours to work Through then yeah, it's going to have these costs associated with it. So yeah So typically recharge 50 up front 20 at design sign off 20 at Your designs are now in the browser and then 10 on when your site's ready to launch not when your site has launched But when your site's ready to launch, um, we can be really flexible. Yeah. Um, and I think, you know, it just depends on the client's Uh aspirations around that, you know, they might have financial milestones that they need to hit to pay you, you know So yeah, we can be pretty flexible around that. Um Much pushback on that would start to ring a bell for me though. Yeah, definitely. Yeah Yeah And Yeah, yeah um, at the moment we have nine active projects and In the last 12 months we worked on 60 digital projects. So quite a lot. I um, I You know, I get really twitchy when we don't have much in the pipeline. Um, I like to have a nice fat full pipeline of inquiries And how much is Interesting. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, so um Actually this year we've been really surprised by the amount of repeat clients and I think it's because we are In a bit of a space where we've been around for a few years So we might have built your website Previously and now you're you're back for a new one. So we are starting to see an uptick in that definitely Um, yeah, I think of three projects that we're working on just now that are for existing clients that are now getting new websites Do you have maintenance contracts as well? We do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah Um, it's actually timely that you ask that because we're looking at changing how we deal with that. Um, we have various Levels or tiers of maintenance So from somebody that might have quite basic needs to somebody that needs an immediate response because their licensing system is down For example and their users can't log in to their site. So that can be quite challenging. We use A kind of WordPress management system, I suppose to uh to update multiple sites at once and and so on. So Yeah, cool All right Yeah Yes Yeah, yeah, no, seriously. Uh, actually we talked you say yes as well. Yeah, uh Actually, do you know, do you know what it might sound a bit? um, philosophical, right, but Life is very short. I have two beautiful children, you know, and actually one of the things that I like most about Uh, running my own agency is that when they say dad can you come to school and do this thing with us? I'm like, yeah, do you know what? Yes, I can I can do that and Running my own agency running our agency together gives me the flexibility to do that Do we work too hard in the uk? I think we call we do You know, you're on the train going home emails answering responding, you know Actually, I think there is room for a bit of a change A change there. Yeah, definitely. I could work four days a week. Yeah. Yeah start next week Yeah, go um, I'll we got any more time for Yeah, one more So Okay, yeah, so I thought we're going to get through the top Anybody mentioning doing right Um What are we doing? Okay. So I've been pretty open with you. Let me be open with you again on this We have been late to the party with Gutenberg. Definitely and I think We will be not not not using it, but we will be Configuring our client sites to work with a classic editor. I think for now So in the past we've used visual builders. We've you know, we've built sites that Are commercially focused sites as well that can't afford just to stop working, you know That the content editors can't log in and you know update the sites. So I think it is going to be challenging. We're currently Trialing a bunch of stuff internally. We've got a bit of a an internal project that we're working on just now To really help us understand the message that we want to communicate. We are starting to get Nervous emails from customers though, you know saying I keep seeing this every time I log in, you know, a new editor is coming, you know But as far as I understand it is it's been pushed back again, right the release date. So yeah, yeah, I think for now We're going to roll with a classic editor But I think it's going to be interesting and we've got a couple of projects That are starting to bubble away that I think we might end up building with Gutenberg So, you know a bit of both I think is the answer Yes I think that's something that I really enjoy about what we do because of the size that we are We can talk about something among anything and be doing it Tuesday Wednesday, right? And there's nobody to say, you know, there's a review process there You know, you have to pass it up to this person and then they have to decide right actually we get to decide And and that's really cool. So if we want to start playing around with whether it's Gutenberg or whether it's I don't know A mapping library Then we can do that. Yeah, so definitely one eye on the future One eye on our clients as well making sure they're behaving. But yeah, definitely one eye on the future at all times Cool. All right. All right. Nice. Thank you very much