Really Well, today we're gonna be talking about setting a website to a client. Now, once running your design business, you'll often get quote requests for websites. And these requests vary greatly. Some will be for small sites, some will be for large site, some will want a logo, others won't. Some will have a website already they want to improve others will want a brand new one. But what this lecture is all about is how you handle the client request for a website.

I've had many requests for websites over the years, and I've kept what I've written and I've constantly reviewed it. So in this lecture, I'm going to show you what I've written back from those requests so you can quickly copy and paste them back to the people who request and website from you, but it's a little bit difficult knowing where to start in this process because when you want to start a website, I would say that you usually need four things. And here they are, you need to decide on the website's purpose, you need to decide on the websites to main, you need to register the domain, and you need a web host. And that's just for starters. Now, some people will come to you with all these four things. Some people will come to you with none of these four things.

The most important is the first one there, your website's purpose. What do you want your website to do for its visitors? And what do you want its visitors to do when they get to the website. Now, some people may come to you and they've already got this absolutely sorted out. But some people will come to you and they haven't. And this is a window of opportunity for you to sell SEO services, and other things and we're going to get on to diversification later on in the course.

And I have to say at this point that of course, some people come to you with an idea for a website. And they don't really know the target market, and they don't really know what to do with it. That can be one of the red flags, as well. But we've dealt with that already. For any website to succeed, it's critical to know the audience and the means to reach them, try and introduce your client into a bit of keyword research, explain to the client how to run a successful website. And that would be by using blogging, SEO, social media and relationships.

And this will, again, open up the clients to your other services. But for all of the articles on this list, you need to find out whether the client has them. And if not, you have to talk to the client about how you can provide these for them and how much they're going to cost. And that's even before you started talking about the website. Here is an example of what you can send to the client in an email form of what you can do for them. So this comes from the emails that I've sent clients and people potential clients.

So thank you for your inquiry, I'll definitely be able to help you design and build your websites. Here's what will be included in the package. Okay, so the first one, obviously the ability to add, edit and delete content. And this is of course, because I'm going to be using WordPress, but I'll come on to that later. Secondly, SEO. Thirdly, explain about the URLs for flee a sitemap.

Now the client needs to know what all these means. And maybe if the client isn't too technical, you can cut out some of this. But this is an example of what I tend to do for all clients regardless of whether they've asked for it, but it's in the package and this is what they get because I'm doing it properly, they will get a better functioning website that helps their business more so they're more likely to recommend me to other businesses, and they're more likely to come back for repeat business. So moving on, I talked about whether it has www in the domain, I say follows web standards. I say it's mobile friendly. It's responsive.

Every site I do is responsive to mobiles and tablets. I make sure that the site's load very quickly. And I say that they'll have visitor statistics and that means Of course, I just hook them up to Google Analytics. Okay, social networking and bookmarking buttons very often that clients asked for these sometimes they don't know the difference between those social networking bookmarking buttons at the end of blog posts, like tweet this, etc, versus the social networking and bookmarking profile buttons, so a link to their Twitter page or a link to their Facebook page, and you have to explain this to them. But of course, this is very popular with clients and it's always a good thing to have. And lastly, the contact page.

So that's the end of the email and you can add and take away bullet points as any way you see fit. This forms sort of stock email that you can send and then after the end To that, you can say, and this is how much it will cost. So it's going to be 1000 2000 $3,000 or something like that, obviously, you have to specify more detail, like the number of pages and other functionality that you may have discussed with the client in the contract. And by all means you can pay some of this into the contracts as well, if you like. But it's a nice way of showing that you do all these good things to the client, before you say the price. And of course, the price shouldn't be more than your hourly rate multiplied by the number of hours, you think it's going to take you in a worst case scenario.

And at the bottom there, there's a little caveat which says what the price doesn't include. And this, of course, depends on what you've discussed with the clients. But we're going to come on to ongoing fees later as that's very important. And off site SEO. It's a good thing to mention, because we mentioned earlier that it's optimized for search engines, but we don't want the client thinking that that means they're going to be at the top of Google for a certain phrase, it just means that the on site SEO is going to be done perfectly off site SEO is another question entirely. And that can be offered as an extra service.

So we're just making clear what we can do for this price and what we're not doing for this price. As I've said many times before, in this course, setting up a website for a client can be a process of education, because some people come to you, and they just say that they want a few static pages put up, and they'll hope for the best in this case, you have to try and explain to them that the internet is a living and evolving organism. And as such, the website would be better off living and evolving as well. And by this I mean, try to persuade the clients to write regular content in a blog don't specifically mention the word blog because for some reason, I find clients can be initially resistant to the idea of a blog, but if they don't want one initially, it's quite often that they will One in six months time after you've supplied the five page static sites, and they find that nobody's coming to see it, and it's absolutely useless.

But for that reason, it's good to try and persuade them to start a blog straight away. Similarly, I found that clients always come back to me and asked me to set up an email list for so again, always try to preempt this by persuading them to start one immediately. Obviously, I like to use WordPress to power the website every time I can, I only don't use WordPress if the client specifically is wedded to another CMS, or they want to do some sort of e commerce or more complicated website solution that WordPress isn't suited for. But here's more emails that are sent to clients to introduce them to WordPress. So this is just explaining what WordPress is a content management system and it provides the client with an intuitive back end to manage site as well as a coherent structure and good SEO out of the box.

And here I've got Further information on WordPress, how it's fantastic on aesthetics, web standards and usability, etc, etc. This used to be more common. I had to persuade people to use WordPress in the past. But I must say nowadays, I find myself persuading people a little less as most people want WordPress in the first place. But here it is. Anyway.

Another thing you can do, of course, is go to the WordPress showcase and find some sites that use WordPress because there's usually some pretty huge blogs like the New York Times and stuff like that on their showcase. So that's always a good thing to do for clients as well. I always find it's better to create a visual of the homepage, at least in Photoshop first, so the client can agree on the way it looks, pixel by pixel. And then you can recreate that in WordPress, this is the best way to handle client requests for websites because they have no ability to go back and say, Oh, I don't want that there. I can remove this here and move that They're which is very difficult when you've started coding the website. So here's something I say in my emails to clients to explain why I'm doing a first shot visual, our first percent visual of how I expect the homepage to look, you'll be able to make comments and suggestions on this, which will be amended and agreed upon.

And as you can see at the top there, there's a link to another one of my Udemy courses with another 50% off offer for you who are taking this course the reason I mentioned this one at the moment is because that's where I've taken the picture of the Photoshop visual. So let me just show you that crucial stage here. It's important to tell the client that this should never take more than two or three rounds. It's good to specify the number remember just like the number of logos we had in that example earlier with experienced this won't be necessary as you'll usually agreed on the finalized version. On the second or third attempt. I send the visuals to the client as links to web pages presenting the image and the page title.

And I find this better for the client to actually see the pages in a browser rather than just sending a JPEG in an email. And again, I show you how to do that in the course where the link is above there. And the beauty of this WordPress process that I do for clients is that it makes the client do the work. So the client fills up the pages in the WordPress text editor. And the client gets an understanding of how he can edit and create the content on the website. And as soon as you get the client to do that, the better because then the client will do it more and more and more, and the website has more chance of success.

And this is a great time saver. The clients appreciate the easy, intuitive administration area in WordPress. And the best way they learned to do it is by practicing but it also has a benefit of course that you don't have to create these pages and client does, so there's less room for error. And if there is an error, it's the clients fault and not yours. So as the clients agreed from the design, you create the website in WordPress, and it looks exactly like it did in the visual, the client enters the content, and everyone's happy. So that's just the website then.

But obviously, there's a lot of related areas. And I'm going to come to these later on in the course. But some clients will want you to sell them domain name registration, hosting and maintenance. And this is good in some ways, as it means an ongoing payment coming to you every month or every year for hosting and maintenance or whatever they require. Sometimes they'll want to host it themselves. Sometimes they'll want to register the domain name themselves, but they want you to sort out the hosting, but I'm always happy to offer any of these services if they ask for them, but I charge premium rate for this and for good reason.

Now, you may think that putting a client's website on your host and charging them for it is easy money. But it isn't. Let me tell you, if anything goes wrong with the site or email, then the client is going to contact you and expect a speedy and successful outcome. So think about this when you're setting a monthly or annual price for hosting and maintenance. Now, I would really go crazy on this. So don't be afraid to charge $25 a month or 250 $300 a year for hosting that only costs you a fraction of that because the client is paying your time to liaise with the host every time something goes wrong.

Now of course, it's best to use hosts that you really can rely on the ones you use as well. So I've got some affiliate links here for services that I use. So I know they work With the host and the email Hostgator for reseller program for hosting multiple sites, now, if you're gonna do email, I would always put email through Google Apps for Business. And that's very important, you'll have a lot less problems if you do that. So I really recommend that one. Otherwise, I would say don't do email because email can be more problematic than web hosting.

So domain name registration, GoDaddy, but obviously, there are many others and they're all just as good as each other name cheap or any of those companies. And of course, I use AWeber for email marketing. So creating websites for businesses may be the cornerstone of your business. But remember, no two websites are ever the same. However, it's essential that you develop systems and task lists for them as you go along. As this will save you time and make you more money going forward.

So in this lecture, I've tried to show you some of my systems. And I've tried to show you why systems are such a good idea in web design. I've also tried to show you how running a web design business is not only about web design, it's not only about offering web design, you should be continually trying to offer your clients allied services like SEO, email marketing, hosting, maintenance, and all these other things, because it's actually very difficult to make money, just doing websites. And I'm going to come on to that later. Thank you very much.