Rick

The problem ladies and gentlemen with these matters is mufti-faceted.

1. Agencies who are building web presences for businesses first need establish their workflow presentation to a prospect client. Web designers and design firms tend not to do this as they never had formal position. A software developer, any software developer that has worked for a firm still alive knows it by heart.

It takes multiple meetings to establish what resources will be needed and design firms dont like to do that as they are going to need do it without pay for that time investment. One sits down with the client and establishes their needs. At the next meeting resources necessary and options are discussed. Then yet another meeting to show the client the “bottom line” and see if there are any other requirements to be met. Finally a last meeting to get the ball rolling, deposit on the work, displaying a mockup to them etc.

A complete checklist need be established. We have six of them in fact that took over 4 years to refine. A client might want interactivity such as wordpress with effective eCommerce for example. This requires two of our checklists be gone through, explained to the client and what if anything we manage or what they wish manage. All six documents integrate together seamlessly. eCommerce for example through a CMS and expecting it to be effective for a client is simply ludicrous. A mom and pop shop can use say Woo Commerce but to be truly effective when one has multiple parties involved in the commerce process which is near always the case… Forget it. Magento, Prestashop, CS-Cart etc. make Woo look like “Poo”. We wont even offer it to our clients as we know they will get upset.

eCommerce has everything from product content to inventory to accounting, fulfillment, support etc. A one or two person operation Woo Can Do, but again, completely ineffective in respect to the customers prospective success lacking hoards of features considered standard in commerce.

2. The application (at this point in time) is critical as well. If they want something complex than Joomla which we loath is more powerful than Wordpress. We know full well 99% of clients will be ever so frustrated if they try deal with Joomla. They DO NOT WANT TO LEARN. Wordpress is easier albeit they dont want learn that either. With Wordpress, Prestashop, Magento, OpenCart and e107 we provide a CDROM with videos step by step considerably better than trying to hunt on youtube and of better (professional) quality. We provide FAQ sheets to cover common issues/questions. We considered releasing them for resale but they’d end up being pirated by other firms we figured. We DONT create ANY site and just tell a client “Here its done. Thanks. Need anything call us or worse yet email us”. We provide support before we even deploy EVEN if we are managing the site.

3. Many many CMS systems are out there and many are quite simple to use. Designers dont want learn new things and present multiple options to clients. Wordpress is overkill for many a site and something like Simple CMS or others will suffice and they can manage their own sites.

I cannot begin to tell you how many “design firms” screw up loosing clients or loosing prospect clients via word of mouth. In fact, we get more clients from other firms screw ups than anything else. When a client wants a simple business website with occasional updating we wont use Wordpress. We will select a simple CMS. They are happy, they tell others, we get referrals.

Understand something, they dont CARE about the cost. They CARE about a site being effective and an asset to their business. They dont WANT nor should they NEED to learn or RELY on support all the time.

We stopped even actively promoting on the web as we get 95% of our clients from screw ups of other firms. At this moment there are 72 jobs in our queue, 17 of those are via referrals, every other one is an existing presence which was completely botched by the original firms they contracted to represent or create their web presence.

4. Design firms think about THEIR WORKFLOW and ignore the clients workflow. Virtually every single one of them. WIX is a huge success because of design firms ignoring client workflow and I know of at least two entities (one sizeable here local to us) that are going after that exact market.

5. Workflow in Wordpress is not good. Websites need integrate into a given businesses workflow. Not be some foreign disease they need try figure out how to integrate and leverage. Thats why they are hiring us not to just create a pretty web entity for them with bells and whistles.

6. Design firms like to explain their workflows to a client and thus justify the cost of the work yet ignore the clients needed workflow which is WHY they are looking to a design firm.

7. Every firm needs a decent software engineer on staff. Why? Because they are the people that KNOW WHAT THE SOFTWARE CAN AND CANNOT DO TOWARDS THE CLIENTS NEEDED WORKFLOWS. THEY can modify perhaps a plugin to suit, stay secure and be effective. For example, last week it took me all of two hours to bridge Wordpress to Amazon’s marketplace for a business that wants display and have their products on Amazon available for purchase through their website via Amazon.com.

They initially came to us after two other “design firms” screwed them. First one was Joomla with Virtuemart (a piece of crap). Second firm they hired did their site in Wordpress w/ Woo Commerce and again, not a thought about the businesses success thats “Their problem”. Thats what they were told. The design firm told them, “We can only build the site, we cant make your sales effective via it”. Nice! They came to us via a referrer. I looked at the sites. Re-enabled the Joomla site on their backend of their shared host (Bluehost, another crap operation designers love as they are cheap) to look at it. How do I know they are crap. Just stress test via Visual Studio a website hosted there. Thats how. In comparison 1 AND 1 will hold better than 400% more page views in the same benchmark. I upload a script I coded to a hosting account, run a windows program I coded up and there sits the results. Simple.

Anyways… Client hired these firms to get them effective sales on the Internet. They failed. First meeting we had in December where I popped their wordpress site up on a projector. I asked them, “What is wrong with this website creating effective sales for you?” The response was one in the area of, “We dont understand it. Everything works. The firm we hired said it would be effective for our needs. When we asked them why we are not seeing sales occur they said we need spend money to advertise on the Internet and that they cannot help us in making our products effective for Internet sales”.

I asked them, “Did they show you how to effectively market your products via the advertising they advised? Did they state as to how when you pay them to help you advertise they will effectively target your market demographics?”

You’d thought I just said, “GHOST!!!!!”. They sat there staring at me not knowing what to say.

I continued and told them there is nothing wrong with their products web viability at all. The problem is they are not getting traffic into their website and if they were to get effective traffic into the website Woo Commerce will completely make a mess of their workflows not even knowing what those workflows were. I said, “Lets say you get 300 orders a day start coming in and you need deal with this ridiculous excuse for an eCommerce storefront presence.” I showed them workflows as are common in Magento.

They instantly said, “Thats what we want!”.

I said, “No it is not. As we still have the problem of getting effective market demographic traffic into your website. You are a needle in a global haystack. We can expend tens of thousands of dollars attempting advertise through the common mechanisms of the Internet that are no longer effective such as Adwords, Banner exchanges etc”.

They looked like Deer in headlights. Thats EXACTLY what they were presented with at this other firm. Non-Web, Non-Marketing professionals thinking about their wallets and not the clients.

Web sites ARE MARKETING. If a Design firm has no marketing professional then they are essentially snake oil salesman.

I directed the Web Browser to Amazon.com and said, “Have you ever heard of this company?” Of course they have. I told them, this company is the undisputed leader in eCommerce. They began as a garage start-up. They enjoy thousands of transactions every second of the waking day. This is where you want sell your products.

The response, “We dont know how and no other firm has stated this to us even though we spoke with many before moving forward”. They asked me how much it would cost for “us” as a firm to make it happen. I told them we can coach you through it, your cost is $40 a month to Amazon.com plus their percentile of fee’s based on transactional amounts. So they asked, “For each product?” I responded, “No. Thats for unlimited products and if you wish for a small additional fee Amazon will even manage end user fulfillment for you”.

So they said lets do that. Two hours later I had them listing products on Amazon.com fully comfortable with workflow and how they can download order reports to integrate into their workflow.

When we went to part they asked how much they owe us. I said, “You do not owe us a red cent”.

They insisted on writing a check in the amount of $1000. I refused it. Two weeks later a new king sized bed and mattress set arrived at my front door (they sell home bedding and home based stuff, lamps etc etc).

I called them and said, “Whats up with that?”. They told me they had more sales in two weeks then the prior four years of trying operate their own website. They want meet with us and are so excited by what else we might offer.

We meet few weeks later and I asked them, “What would you think your next step should be?” They responded in saying, “Making our own web presence grow. If Amazon can do this for us surely there is more that we can do as well?”. I said, “Correct.” and continued, “Now we need build your brand. So we need a website that focuses on support of products sold, roll outs of new product, making sure your brand of your website(s) is associated to the brand we set up via Amazon. Getting word out there through opt-in mailing list signups. Making a email enabled advertisements page for effective email marketing. Getting products listed at Amazon unto your website so as people can shop at your site yet end purchase made through Amazon ensuring the customers are confident about the transactions and whom they are transacting with and through.”

They were semi Wordpress comfortable, I handed them our FAQ sheet book, the training DVD they can pop into any PC or DVD Player. Our visual (transparencies & prints) showing the wordpress workflows. Took a few moments with donuts and coffee for them to browse the documents. They said several of the FAQ items they’d already dealt with and had to PAY to have resolved.

Then the proprietors second in charge piped up and said, “How come more design firms do not engage in this more comprehensive approach to working with businesses interested in using the Internet?” I told her, “Because they are interested in getting work to do and the more they can sell you then the more work they have. They are disinterested in your success .vs. theirs. They are unaware of engineering, they are unaware of marketing, they do not take the time to understand the requirements and for those that do they may not be able to meet the requirement yet do not wish loose a prospect client”.

I received Deer in the headlights again.

I told them, “Marketing is far far far more complex than software engineering and I am a software engineer. I also have 15 years of learning marketing from a professional politician who essentially sells people to people. Marketing is chock full of variables as every person is different. Software engineering albeit complex sits within defined finite boundaries of what it as an application is to utilize as input and produce output. The Internet and many websites are all about marketing. If a firm does not understand marketing or care to understand ways of how to market whatever the product, service or information is… What business do they have creating web sites?”

That is the truth.

It is EXACTLY the truth that Web.com, Wix and many others to come are and will utilize to put design firms “under”. Yet, those entities cannot provide the level of support and market understanding that YOU designers and design firms CAN. But in order to do that you as designers and firms need A. Have proper staff and/or B. Learn. Take some marketing classes, read some books. Not only will it help market your firm and services but also make your clients a WHOLE lot happier.

Dont even bother to offer crap like Woo Commerce or Virtuemart or even effective items such as say Prestashop or Magento. Mention them. Leave them in the “To do queue”. Aka: As your brand gets more established via Amazon and the marketing of your website down the road a year we can sit down and discuss deploying web stores essentially expanding your presence and making sure your eggs are not all in one basket.

It doesnt matter the feature, perhaps its forums or blogs or this or that. The client stays in the queue step by step and in doing so they quite quickly realize that instead of being a designer or firm aiding them in succeeding, ideas and forward movement they instead have a partner, an invaluable one that not only is there for them as they grow step by step but making sure said growth in as far as the web is managed proper, staged at the right times and more.

We take this approach with EVERY client and you as a designer or design firm dont need chase, cohort, whatall clients. Word of mouth alone will give you all the business you could ever have dreamed of. For every client that no longer needs your service, there will be 10 or more others pounding at your door via word of mouth alone.

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