In this episode of Websites Made Simple, "Nail the website design workflow and land new business" I'm talking you through the critical importance of streamlined processes for website development and effective client communication.

Discover practical strategies to structure your workdays, set clear boundaries, and manage client expectations to avoid common pitfalls like 'ghosting'.

We’ll discuss why having robust guidelines for your clients, including collecting essential content upfront, is crucial for success.

Whether you’re a website designer just starting or a seasoned pro, this episode is packed with actionable tips to refine your workflow and elevate your web design business.

Learn how organisation and strong communication can enhance client satisfaction, save time, and set your projects up for success.

Want to optimise your website development process and take your web design business to the next level? Best click play then!

00:00 Website Designer Communication Issues

06:09 Copywriting Alternatives and Solutions

07:15 Website Design & SEO Course described

10:18 Website Design Setup Essentials

15:39 Effective Website Building Boundaries

17:44 "Collaborative Web Design Success"

Websites Made Simple Courses

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Squarespace
• Shopify
• WordPress
• Wix
• WeTransfer

Links referenced in this episode:

• courses.thisdemandinglife.com
• wetransfer.com

Mentioned in this episode:

Websites Made Simple Courses

Check out our Websites Made Simple courses!

Websites Made Simple Courses

Remember to sign up for our blogging masterclass!

Go to https://websitesmadesimple.co.uk/masterclass

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I want to talk about processes.

Hello and welcome back to Websites Made Simple.

I am Holly Christie.

I am a website designer, a founder, a mentor, a podcast host, and I am here to help you to have an amazing website design business.

So if you are a website designer or a developer, and you're hoping that this year is going to be your year, that you're really, really going to make something of your business, then you are absolutely in the right place and I am here to help you to get there.

As website designers, our processes are the most important part of our businesses.

And the processes come in many forms.

One of them is how we handle website builds.

So what days we work on the build, how we run the build, that sort of thing, but also how we let clients know what's going on with it.

The other side of it is about how you run your business and particularly around your communication with clients.

Because I have been a website designer for a very, very long time, and what I hear the most of from clients is that their website designer has been ghosting them, that they are not getting the service they want or the response they want.

And in the end, it generally leaves quite bad feeling and people will end up either ditching the project or they will eventually kind of see it through to the end of the project, and then they will get another website designer to come and clean it up.

There are many, many times where I have been that website designer who's come in and done the cleanup.

Sometimes, you know, the websites aren't built that brilliantly, but other times, everything else is right.

And what's made the experience, experience not so great is the processes of the designer as they've gone through this experience.

So that's what I wanted to talk through today.

When people say about their website designer ghosting them, it's often due to a lack of organization on the website designer's part.

A message will come in and the designer will think, oh, I'll get to that, I'll get to that.

And it just falls down to the bottom of the list.

And as you'll know, because you'll have your own website domain and things like that, when we work in this space, we get tens of emails a day from people offering to rebuild our websites, from SEO companies, all that sort of thing.

So it is really, really easy for this stuff to fall down to the bottom of our inboxes.

But there's also the case of the website designer often doesn't have brilliant boundaries that they're holding with the clients or a brilliant process in place to Say to the clients, this is what I need from you to be able to get started with the website.

This is when you'll hear from me, and this is when I need to hear back from you to be able to move it forward as well.

The disorganization I spoke about on behalf of the website designer can also come through because clients don't tend to prioritize their website builds.

It's one of the things that website designers say to me over and again that they feel really frustrated by, and that is that the client will drip feed content.

So they'll say, here's the homepage content for you to get started with.

Or if you just start with these three pages, I will get these other pages to you later.

It makes for absolute chaos, because website builds are something that I think clients really underestimate how big and how committed you need to be to a website build.

And I'm known for telling people that a website build is like having your online home.

If you were doing that, if you were, say, building your own house out of bricks and mortar, you would not say to the builder, here are enough bricks for you to build the kitchen.

I'll get back to you with the bricks for the living room when I'm ready, or here's the bricks, but I don't have the cement for you.

Or, you know, whatever it is.

And especially if you're building a house, you have to have planning permission and all that sort of thing.

And the same amount of planning needs to go into a website build.

This is something that people do not realize.

And one of the reasons that they don't realize it because of all those pesky tools like Squarespace and Shopify and WordPress and Wix stuff, who said, oh, you don't need any experience to be a web designer.

You know, just come and build your own website.

And it is so irresponsible in their marketing, but obviously it gets some people on board.

These tools are probably what got you into the web design business.

And, you know, certainly for me, I had a slightly different start in web design because it was something I was doing before, but when I started the actual building, I was using the free tools as well.

Sometimes with these processes, people don't plan their websites very well because they don't know any better.

And as someone who wants to have a really good experience with their clients, it's your job to get them to really understand what it is that they need.

There's the usual stuff that we know that we need.

We need the client's Branding and we need them in files which are going to show up well on the website.

So that means basically not knocking a brand up in Canva and whacking it onto the website.

It means having proper files for the branding that has come through and preferably with brand guidelines as well from a branding designer.

We need the website copy again.

I always advocate for people using copywriters for the website because good website copy will absolutely influence and inform the design and the build and it will make your job a lot easier.

And if someone really doesn't want to use a copywriter, I would absolutely recommend that they do a copywriting focus hour or a power hour with a copywriter.

Or some copywriters also offer like a copy polish service or a copy consult where they might spend an hour on Zoom with a client explaining to them and giving them templates of how to write the website copy.

And then the client goes away and writes it and then they submit it back to the copywriter to be able to polishes and clean it all up for them.

So that's quite a good compromise and a good middle ground.

And if someone doesn't want to invest that money in their website copy, then I would look at sending them to a website copywriting course.

And they don't have to be shockingly expensive, they just have to teach someone.

Because writing for a website is not the same as writing for anywhere else.

And again, even things like as a web designer it is your job to know how to handle the SEO of the website copy.

And that doesn't mean that you've got to take their copy and stuff it full of keywords or anything like that.

It just means that you have to put all the headings in the right places, in the right sequences where the calls to action go.

And if this is something, if you're quite new to web design or you've been going for a while, but it's all self taught and you just think that you could use polishing up some of those skills.

I have a course on how to understand your user's journey through the website and it's on my courses website which is courses.thisdemandinglife.com and that is £27.

So it's really affordable.

And I have an unlocking SEO boost, your website's online visibility course as well, which talks you through exactly all the SEO things you need to do for a website build as well.

So if you're not sure you can find those resources there.

So one of the things I find as well in the early Ish days of website design as a business is that we don't always know how to let our clients know what it is that we need from them.

So going back to what we were saying, we know that we need the branding from them, we know that we need images.

And I like to give image guidelines as well, which say, you know, preferably they're going to be professional images and you know, where necessary, stock photography and where possible please don't submit images that have been taken on a phone.

But you know, from time to time they are going to need that.

But it has to be kind of quite clear that the backgrounds have to be very clean and you know, we don't want to put a load of selfies and stuff like that up on the website.

And the images have to be high res, although when we put them into the website we're going to compress them beforehand.

But we want them to submit high res ones.

We want them to have quite a lot of negative space.

And I say to clients often graphic designers and branding designers will say to me, what size images do you need for the website?

And actually the size of the images doesn't really matter.

What matters is that there's at least 30% of negative space within the image so that it can be cropped for the website as well.

If you don't have a resource which tells your clients how to submit their website content, then have a think about coming up with some of these guidelines for clients because it will make such a difference if you can just hand them.

This is what you need.

You know that it's written, you know, in a PDF or on a Google form or however you choose to submit that to them, but you've got it in writing what they need and they can refer back to it.

Some web designers actually send checklists to their clients.

If this is what you need and you know, check it off as you get it all ready and then I will check it off as I receive it from you as well.

So there's branding, that's images, there's the website copy.

I also ask people to send any links of anything they need once on the website.

So links to calendars or blog posts, whatever it is that they are going to want to link to from the website, I am going to need that link from them as well.

We'll talk about hosting and whether I'll be hosting the website for them or whether they already have hosting or want support with getting it set up.

But we also have a domain information sheet because the Internet's been around long enough now that by the time people come to a web designer, they usually have an email address associated with their work.

They may have bought the domain themselves, that sort of thing.

And it is much easier again to have something in black and white that they can get the information ready for you so that when you're ready to go live with the website, you've got everything you need.

And that would be the domain info sheet will have like where the domain is held, what the login details are for, what email addresses are attached to it, how those email addresses are set up.

For example, are they with Outlook, are they with Microsoft Office?

Are they just hosted and using a different mail client?

And it really just helps because if you get everything up front from them before you get started, you are going to have a much easier process for your web design build because you don't have to back and forth with the client trying to get information out of them.

And it means that you can build as much or as little of the website as you like before showing them.

There's no kind of stopping point where you have to stop everything grounds to a halt where you have to go back to the client and say, I haven't got this from you, Please can I have this from you?

You then have to wait for them to prioritize it and then send this to you.

And then once they've sent it to you, you then go on to build it and then you give them the feedback.

So it really is important that within your processes you have a really robust system so that your client knows exactly what they need from you.

I also like to set a deadline with my clients as well.

And it's not, you know, deadline sounds really harsh, but say, okay, we're on this date now.

How long do you think it's going to take you to get this copy?

And that could depend on if they're using Copywriter or a branding specialist or a photographer, what their availability is.

And then we say, okay, you know, we'll work it out, we'll look for a date.

I ask for content to be with me within six weeks of having booked the website build.

And so we agree a date that they're going to send that content.

And then a week before, sometimes two weeks before, I will email them and say, how are you getting on?

I know that this is the date we're working towards.

And it means that if they're struggling a bit, it just helps them to get back on track to prioritizing it.

It also gives a kind of touching base point that if they want to ask me for a recommendation or want some support, there's still time for us to do that because I'm not waiting until it's on the day and then saying where is it?

So that always helps.

And the thing is, I've had a couple of clients over the many years I've been in business who have not really been very interested in the website build.

You know, for them it's just a shop front.

It's something they have to have, maybe a bit of nice to have and they're not really interested.

And those are the clients I try not to work with because I want to work with people who see they recognize the investment that they're making in their online presence, they have a lot of respect for what's going on, they're excited to get it launched and they really want a fantastic representation of them and their company rather than a this will do response as well.

So I would say always try and work with people who are actively engaged within the website build as well, because also they'll want to get started, they'll want to get the content with you.

I ask people to send me all the content in one go, where possible.

Sometimes it'll come in separately if it's coming in from a independent photographer or something like that.

And I ask them to put it all in a folder and send it to me via WeTransfer and WeTransfer.com if you haven't heard of it.

It allows you to send up to two gigs, but you can have paid for accounts which will give you even more space there.

They can send the content across in a folder.

It sends you a link, you download it.

What I really like about WeTransfer as well is it's not a folder like Google Drive or Dropbox or something like that where people can add to the folder or take things away.

And I learned this really in my early days of web design when I was working with a web designer and a branding specialist and a photographer.

And as I was building the website, other people were taking folders out of the Dropbox folder.

And I was kind of left scrabbling around trying to regain this kind of stuff.

But it also means that clients can't suddenly have an idea of an extra page or something like that and then just sneak it in.

I had a client who did that once by hyperlinking pages within pages within Google.

So when I built the website, she said to me, where are these other two pages?

And I was like, they're not in the Google Drive.

I said, oh yeah, I hyperlinked them there.

And so I ended up building, and these were earlier days, I ended up building an additional two pages essentially for free because it was just all a muddle because that boundary wasn't there.

So a good boundary is always to use something that people can't add to and they can't take away from.

And only get started when you've checked off your checklist that you have all of the content that you need.

Just remember with clients as well that for them a website build isn't something they do every day.

And so it's not something that they're going to have really prioritized within their day to a certain extent because they already have their work to do and yet their website kind of isn't part of that daily list.

So just touching base with them and making sure that they're on track can really, really help with this.

And then once you get going with the website build, I mean, I talk all of this through with my clients and if you are wondering about how to hold the boundaries we're talking about with your clients and things like that, then you can look at.

On my courses.thisdemandinglife.com I have a web designer's contract pack there.

It's got every contract you can imagine you could possibly need for running your web design business, including the web design contract and the terms of service.

These give all the time scales for clients of when they can expect to hear from you, how long website builds take, all that sort of thing.

So for me, for custom build websites, I take up to six weeks to build a custom build website.

And once we've got all the text set up, people can expect to hear from me every single week with a video walkthrough of their website.

And when I'm doing that, I will be explaining my thinking because it helps for people to get on board with ideas, especially with design.

If I explain where the thoughts have come from.

These videos, like five minutes, I do them by screen sharing and Vimeo and then just send off the link to the client and then they can come back to me and say about what they do like, what they don't like, what they think they'd like changed, that sort of thing.

And then the next week the next video will say, you know, thanks for your feedback.

I, you know, great that you love it.

And I've made these tweaks and amends accordingly.

It makes the web design process really collaborative.

And one of the main parts of feedback I get from clients is how collaborative the experience is and how much they feel involved in the build.

And it's five minutes of videos each week.

It makes such a massive difference as well.

And the thing is, when people feel that they're getting a really great service as well as the end product, then they are happier to pay more for it and they are happy to recommend you and they come away feeling like they've had a great experience and great time as well.

So good boundaries linked to good processes are really where it's at for you as well.

So I hope that helps you with getting on track and making some tweaks and changes to your web design business so that not only are you showing great boundaries and your clients are going to have great experience, but you're going to have a really good experience as well.

Because if a client kind of says, oh, can I just drip feed you this content?

And okay, they're not going to use the words drip feed, but if they say that, you can come back and say to them, and I've done this with clients as well, when they've said, oh please, can we use Dropbox on this occasion.

And I've come back to them on email and I've said, I want us to have a really good experience working together.

And I know I can't deliver a good experience when we're working on Dropbox because I need everything up front.

I need it to be really clear.

And if there is an addition to the website along the way, then I need that to be agreed between us rather than find out through a Dropbox folder.

And for that reason we use Wetransfer.

There's always a way to handle that.

So thanks for listening and until next time, go implement and enjoy and I will see you again soon.