If your clients keep coming back with “How do I log in?” and “How do I change an image?”, it isn’t because they’re difficult.

It’s because nobody ever handed them a manual for the thing you just built them.

Check out my group offer: https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk/sparks-group-mentoring/

It’s a supportive group mentoring session for website designers and developers to bring their questions, roadblocks, ideas, and “is it just me?” moments.

Welcome to another episode of Websites Made Simple with me, Holly Christie.

In this episode, I’m walking you through exactly how I create a website user manual for every single client: what goes in it, how it’s built, and how it went from a job that ate my time to a template I barely have to touch.

There’s a free template to go with this episode, so you can start your own straight away: https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk/website-manual

We get into:

Why a user manual is the difference between a delighted client and endless “how do I…” emails

How to build yours in Canva and send it as a PDF, and why I never host it on my own site

What to tell clients about themes, plug-ins and premium licences before they’re your problem

The front page details that protect you months down the line

The five minute “Welcome to Your Website” screen recording that shows them the back end

Why a page speed screenshot on handover day saves you an argument with an SEO later

The dedicated log-in page that kills half your support emails

How to record your tutorial videos once and reuse them on every single website

The troubleshooting page that says “clear your cache” in ten different ways

Where to point clients for extra help, and how you want them to contact you afterwards

If you want fewer support emails, happier clients, and a handover you can repeat without thinking about it, this one will sort you out.

Come and find out more at https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk or email me at [email protected]

Skip to the good bits:

00:00 How to create a website user manual

00:46 My confession about website handovers

01:33 Why user manuals became my biggest win

02:16 How web designers actually hand over websites

02:58 Why video and written content work best together

03:25 Build it in Canva, send it as a PDF

04:22 Themes, plug-ins and licensing

05:05 What clients need to know about premium licences

06:21 The front page: logo, date and screenshot

07:32 The table of contents

07:57 The “Welcome to Your Website” video

09:01 Page speed screenshots that protect you later

10:06 The log-in page everyone forgets

11:07 Keeping the site updated, and key things to remember

12:01 Record once, use everywhere

14:03 The troubleshooting page

14:53 Additional resources and knowledge centres

15:37 How clients get in touch after handover

16:21 Grab the free template

Mentioned in this episode:

Join my Sparks Group Mentoring Programme

In this episode, I am going to walk you through how to create an

absolutely brilliant website user manual that you can recreate for every

single one of your website customers.

It's going to give them a brilliant experience.

It means that you're not going to drop the ball on making sure

that they know everything they need to know on their website.

And there's even a free download that goes along with this episode.

You just need to go to websitesmadesimple.co.uk/website-manual,

and you can download a template of your very own to get you started.

But in the meantime, let's get started.

I feel that's a bit of a crap beginning, but if you need

me to re-record it, we will.

I've got a confession to make.

When I first started building websites, I did not think about what

the user experience was going to be the other side of the website.

I mean, obviously I wanted the website visitors to come on

and have a great experience.

The websites looked brilliant and they performed well.

But so many people would then say to me, "How do I log into it?" Or, "How do

I change an image?" Or, "How do I add some text?" And I'd think, "Oh, God.

I've finished with that website now.

Don't you just know how to do this?" And even I knew that I couldn't just

say to them, "Go away and Google it." So after a few times of having this

happening, I came up with creating website user manuals for my clients.

And I have to say, hands down, it has been one of the biggest

successes of my business.

It consistently gets great feedback because it leaves no stone unturned.

The clients know exactly how to use their website, how it's built, and I've

got it through into a process that I now have it as a template, and actually my

part in now creating that user manual each time is really, really small.

So in this episode, I'm gonna walk you through this So that you can have

a really cohesive system for your clients that empowers them to work

well on their website and it leaves you free to go and build your next site.

So let's get going So a website user manual, I would say some people do

use them and create them already.

Some people don't.

They are not created equally.

And all you have to do is to jump onto Facebook or a LinkedIn group, anywhere

where web designers are hanging out, and you'll see that people consistently say,

"How do you hand over your websites? What information and training do you do?"

Some people will offer like a 90-minute Zoom session where they walk people

through and they record the session.

Other people might be using an app like Tango where it records the clicks and

dictates it all, leaving a client pages and pages of information to work through.

I like to have a combination of video and written content.

I keep the written content for the really important stuff, and

I use the video content so that they can copy it click by click.

And today I'm going to walk you through exactly which videos I have

on there, how I do it, how I structure it so that you can recreate the

same every time for your business.

So the very first thing I want to cover is how we present the user manual to clients.

I create mine in Canva, and your user manual template that you're welcome

to go and download will be a link to a Canva document that you'll be able to

copy and then edit yourself as well.

I then export it as a PDF, and I send it to the clients in an email that

says Website User Manual Attached as well, because I don't want to run the

risk of hosting this in a space on myself and then one day forgetting

about it and taking down the URL.

I also have built hundreds of websites, so if I was hosting the

user manuals on my own website, every time I did a rebuild, I'd be having

to do hundreds of redirects as well.

So I like to create each one in Canva, download it, send it as a PDF.

Also a PDF, a client's not going to be able to go in and change that,

and it's a pretty universal document that they will be able to use.

And I'd like to just put a quick note in here as well.

And while I'll walk you through step-by-step what my user manuals

have in them, what yours should have in them as well, I just want to talk

to you about themes and licensing.

Now, I'm a WordPress website developer, so it means that we have themes that we use,

different tools, different plug-ins, and some of those will have licenses that we

pay for, and other stuff might be free.

So this section won't necessarily be very relevant if you're

building on a different platform.

But bear with me because you might get some little nuggets of information there

that inform your own practice as well.

On your client's website manual, you need to include details of the theme.

You need to tell them if it's built in WordPress.

You need to tell them it's a WordPress website.

You need to tell them the theme that's being used and

any plug-ins on there as well.

And you particularly need to let them know if there are premium licenses

and payments that they're going to need to make onward from this.

And if you run an agency model and you're licensing the theme and the

plug-ins off your agency platform and that's tied into hosting and

maintenance, that's absolutely fine.

There's nothing wrong with that.

But you do need to let clients know, and you need to let them know that

if they go on to move their website, that they will need to have their

own licenses for the website to ensure that it continues working.

Now, you can say as of the date that I'm building this website

user manual that this is how much licenses cost, but you don't have to.

You just need to say, "You will be responsible for doing this as well

for licensing your own theme." I use a theme that has lifetime license,

and so I license it for my clients, so it makes it quite clear, and I let

them know what that purchase code is as well in the website user manual.

So now that we've covered that, let's go through it step by step.

So the front page on your website manual should have your logo so it's very

clear which company has produced it.

Who's prepared the manual?

So mine will say prepared by Holly Christie, but I may have had a member

of my team prepare it, and I always like for me and for the clients to know who

has prepared it so that if we need to come back to them, then we can do so.

And the date that the manual was created.

And I just put the month and year.

We don't need to be really pedantic with the day.

I also put the company name that it's been created for, and I include a

screenshot in a fancy little iMac frame.

I include a screenshot of the homepage of the website I'm talking about,

just the above the fold section.

But I always think this is important because it really helps

us with from a branding point of view and a visual point of view.

But if the client does go on to the website and maybe mucks up that above

the fold content or something, you've got a real bonafide sign of what it looked

like when you handed the website over.

So that is really useful So the next thing that I do is I have a table of contents.

And so it tells people what's on each page, subsections of the page.

The main pages are linked, so it will say, you know, how to work on your website or

your website result or page speed results, all that sort of information is in there.

And again, I have this in the template for you as well, but having a very quick link

from that page makes it really useful.

So then we go onto the good stuff.

I create a screen recording of the website when we send it live, and it's of

the back end of the website, and I just call the video Welcome to Your Website.

And it's a walkthrough of the sides of it that the clients haven't seen yet.

So the client will have seen all of the front end of the website because

they will have approved the design.

This now shows them how it's built, where the pages are, where the layout sections

are, how to look at their forms or get any information from the forms, even

though it is designed to email them.

the plugins that are used, it has absolutely everything so that they can

find their way around their website.

And it doesn't have to be hugely detailed.

It's just a quick click around really, and it normally takes about

five minutes to produce this video.

I host it in Vimeo.

But I do understand that Vimeo is, like, really putting their

fees up, so people are talking about other platforms like Livvid.

So host it wherever you like and then click it through there.

I have, like, a video symbol button that I use to click it through.

And then the next thing I have below that on the next page is a screenshot

of the website results on Google from a page speed insights test

from when we sent the website live.

And within this screenshot, I include the date and time, and you can see

the email address where I've moved it from a temporary domain that

this website was tested as well.

And again, this really comes from experience, and you may have heard me

talk about this a little bit on the older episodes of the podcast, where

you might have an SEO person come on board, and SEOs can be a little

bit, let's say, upfront at times.

And they'll often come on and say, "Oh, the website's not fast enough.

Oh, it's not doing this," or, "It's not doing that." And there can just sometimes

be a little bit of discord around that.

And I find having screenshots that includes that information that's

been willingly and transparently handed over to the client just

really helps your cause here as well.

So that's the next thing that I have there Then this is the important one.

This is something that's quite a new addition for me, is a page, because

we're always learning, is a page that says how to log in to your website.

And if you have listened to my episode on checklists about how to sign a

website off properly, you will know that this is something that I have

dropped the ball on more than once.

I have sent the client everything that they need, and they're like,

"That's lovely. How do I log in?" So there's a dedicated page.

I have a little screenshot of the WordPress lo- login page, and

then o- that goes on the right.

On the left-hand side it says, "How to log in to your website.

This is the link.

This is your username.

The site will email you a link to, uh, set your password, but if not, go to this

page, click the forgot password link, and you'll be able to get that." And you

can use that link every time for logging in as well, not the forgot password one.

But that will save you so many emails, having a specific page dedicated to that.

So the next thing I have is the how to keep your website up to date page, and

this one I feel is really important.

Even if I am doing the hosting and maintenance of their website for

them, I always make sure that they know how to do this themselves.

And for that reason, these instructions are typed so they

don't have to watch a video.

They don't have to click into it at all And after that, I have a key

things to remember page as well.

Just stuff that we've normally covered in the welcome to your website video,

but it's stuff that they might need this information and they're not

going to necessarily think to go back to that video or, for whatever

reason, they're not gonna be there.

So I have that, and that information will be your website is using this theme, your

form entries can be accessed from here, how to do this, that, and the other.

It's … You'll see on the templates, it's quite a short but very useful page.

And then I have the actual tutorials.

So this is the section that the clients go back to time and again.

And I am gonna give you the biggest tip here because trust me, as someone

who used to create this for every single website really uniquely,

it took a lot of time and energy.

And then I realized what I could do is I could have standardized

videos for the standard information I was giving across people.

So record once, use everywhere.

And so I created videos on how to add or change an image, and that

includes like labeling it properly, compressing it, saving it to

WebP format, that sort of thing.

How to use titles and headings, how to use Yoast, how to add a blog post,

how to add to portfolio, how to add or amend menus, how to use form elements.

And so I created these videos once.

I, again, I recorded them using Vimeo where I had closed captions

turned on so people could see the transcript side of it as well.

And I also put like a front cover and a back cover on there.

I did this for my Simply Sites websites, so it looked really, really professional.

I also set up a showcase in Vimeo for these so that if there was maybe

a video someone wanted that wasn't in the manual, I could just send

them the link to the showcase, and they could see all of the videos on

how to work on your website as well.

So within the template, I then click onto … So you can click onto any of

those videos, and you'll get that there.

So the only customized video in the template is the welcome to your website

video, and that makes it really useful.

If there is something I've done specifically for a client, like a

specific booking plugin or, you know, I've used ACF for something, then I

will create an additional video in there and add that into this overall section

of how to do this, that, and the other Next, I put a troubleshooting page on.

And again, this was a later addition, but oh my goodness, I cannot

tell you how useful it has been.

And basically, if you're listening to this, you're a website designer, so you

know every single form of troubleshooting basically comes down to clear your cache.

But this just says it in different ways.

So it says, "I've added a blog post and it's not showing," clear your cache.

"I have," yeah, "added something to the basket and I can't check

my basket," clear your cache.

"I'm trying to use WooCommerce on a mobile and it's not showing the checkout

page," disable your caching plugin.

Yes, you have a troubleshooting page.

And I suggest you look at the most times that your clients get in touch

with you and, know, look at what it is that they're asking and put

that page in there for you as well.

I then put any additional resources as well, and clients

can find this really useful.

So the majority of my websites are built using the Avada theme.

They have incredible support and documentation.

So I put a link to the Avada support docs on the website 'cause they've

got their knowledge center there.

There's also a really good Avada Facebook group where one of the, uh,

developers of Avada is in there as well, so there's a link to that group.

I usually use the Yoast plugin for SEO, so I put the links

to the Yoast Knowledge Center.

Anything you use where there is a knowledge center that might be quite

useful where a client can go and search an issue that they're having, put

that into your additional resources.

And then finally Include how to get in touch if they need to get in touch with

you, because it may be that you actually have different email address or different

process or ticketing system or something for websites which have been built as

opposed to websites which are in process or when you're handling new inquiries.

And being able to separate that out can be really useful because I do support my

clients, but I do also have some website support people who work with me as well,

who I might be really busy and say, "I'm going to reroute the suppor- support

email address to you so that you can handle this." So make sure you know if you

need to get in touch with me about your website, this is the address to do that.

And that's it.

You now have a complete website user manual, or at least you'll

have the complete template.

And I will remind you of that address, which is

websitesmadesimple.co.uk/website-manual.

Now, I would love to hear from you what your experience is and what

your sign-off process is because just because I do something one way,

it doesn't make it the right way.

It's turned out to be the right way for me and my clients.

But I love hearing from how other people in this self-taught industry

have really overcome and tackled them.

Or at least if you've had those screw-ups like I have, like forgetting

to send people how to actually log in to their brand-new website or whatever,

and I wanna hear about those as well.

And if you leave it as a voice note, we might even read it out on the podcast.

So you can get in touch with me through email at [email protected].

That comes directly through to me, so if you email me, I will email you back.

You can also reach me through the website, websitesmadesimple.co.uk.

The contact page allows you to drop a voice note in there or type

a message, and you can find me on LinkedIn at Holly C Christie.

So enjoy, and I will see you next episode.