Yesterday I was the presenter at our local WordPress meetup
It's a great group of folks that are developers, designers, site configurators, implementers and business owners. Basically, the group is diverse with a variety of skill sets.
And my topic was how to manage the dynamic, which we've all lived thru before, of dealing with clients who want tons of support to change things after a project is complete and the site is launched.
Over the past years, I've been slowly collecting my own data about the kinds of requests that come after a launch.
The most common requests post-launch
- Moving something on a page (45%)
- Changing an image, text or link (30%)
- A new page design (15%)
- A new bar of color or call to action (10%)
What I told the forty or so folks that were there was that there were several things that never really worked for me.
What didn't work
Getting on a call and teaching my client didn't work because they would do it so rarely that 6 months later they'd have forgotten how to do it.
Just doing it for them never worked because they'd become dependent on me to do their work.
Changing themes to a better fit almost never worked because I would have forgotten how many tweaks I'd made. Ugh. More work.
And sending them to someone else still took time, and only worked if I could cover the cost for that, via an incentive from whoever I was sending them to.
By the way, do you do $500 websites?
I may have mentioned that people who pay for $500 websites aren't really paying for your code. What they're paying for is your phone number. Once they have it, they won't ever stop calling it.
This is why I a) suggest that you raise your rates when you have the skills to do so, and b) get a Google Voice number or something similar.
Options that can work
From there we talked about options that do work, including these three:
- Maintenance agreements
- Not answering the phone or email ever again (kind of extreme, but still)
- Building in some flexibility into your work
This is why I recommend Beaver Builder to WordPress Freelancers
- I recommend Beaver Builder because it allows me to pre-create layouts for customers so that when they need them, they're already there.
- I recommend Beaver Builder because it allows clients to move things around on the page all they like.
- I recommend Beaver Builder because it allows customers to change the text or photo on a page easily.
- I recommend Beaver Builder because creating a new bar of color with a call to action and a button is fast.
- I recommend Beaver Builder because I can create that new bar of color as a layout they can use whenever they want.
- I recommend Beaver Builder because it comes with tons of features but keeps the code lean and performance fast.
Yes, there are a lot of reasons, but there's one quick way I can sum it up. And I wrote it up there as the answer to dealing with post-launch customer questions.
I recommend Beaver Builder because it lets me build some flexibility into my work.