August 19, 2018 — Regardless of its size, the most critical pillar of maintaining and growing your business is going to be servicing clients. For some of us, this is one of the most invigorating parts of what we do, for others, it can be one of the hardest.

In this talk the speaker will propose answers to the following questions:

1. How do you keep sensible boundaries with your clients?
2. How do you say NO without ruining your relationship with your client?
3. How do you make your client an ally instead of feeling like they’re an interruption?
4. How will really serving your client actually serve you?

In the whole gamut of clients, from solopreneurs to international global corporations, one thing is constant, you need your them more than they need you. How this often plays out is that you find yourself bending over backwards to keep them happy… sometimes to your own detriment.

In this talk you’ll learn how to make yourself indispensable to your clients, without becoming a doormat.

Presentation Slides »

August 13, 2018 — WordPress is promoted as a tool to easily publish content, but on the other hand, development of these WordPress projects is a different and complicated story. We will handle the touch points of each project at the workshop – clients, designs, bugs, deadlines, customer support, etc. – and determine which factors affect the deliverable of a typical WP project. We will put a special emphasis on business risk mitigation with WordPress project (not getting your money, breaking deadlines, adjusting budgets, making proper estimates, etc.). Workshop will process the three major phases of each WordPress project: planning and preparation, project implementation, support after launch.

Presentation Slides »

July 10, 2018 — WordPress projects can quickly derail into a series of scope creep items, frustrations, and missing clients. Having a simple and streamlined process to get information from the customer, gathering adequate feedback and keeping your project on task requires some easy adjustments to your process. Stop struggling with bad clients, projects that never end and designing websites to creating a whole experience that will turn nightmare clients into brand ambassadors. Running a WordPress design business is hard work, and there’s more to it than just making websites. Lee has put together real action steps that will take you from welcoming your new client to following up with your happy clients and your new referral sources.

March 5, 2018 — What is the process when starting WordPress project from scratch, from choosing theme, plugins, libraries, project organization, GIT workflow. If you follow some basic rules, your WordPress based development time will be far more less, and you will enjoy it.

Presentation Slides »

February 26, 2018 — When a project goes wrong, most of the time it fails as a result of mismatched expectations. This can be avoided for most clients by following a repeatable and thorough discovery process. Understanding how to ask the right questions up front can mean the difference between happy clients who are eager to give you more business and nightmare clients who can never be satisfied.

This session will focus on:

– Asking the right questions
– Controlling the conversation
– Creating maintainable expectations
– Using discovery throughout your business

January 9, 2018 — When a project goes wrong, most of the time it fails as a result of mismatched expectations. This can be avoided for most clients by following a repeatable and thorough discovery process. Understanding how to ask the right questions up front can mean the difference between happy clients who are eager to give you more business and nightmare clients who can never be satisfied.

This session will focus on:

Asking the right questions
Controlling the conversation
Creating maintainable expectations
Using discovery throughout your business

Presentation Slides »

December 12, 2017 — That phase of any project that, if not pinned down and given the attention it needs, can trip us up big time. Chatting with other small agencies and self-employed WordPress developers and designers, I’ve found we all share experiences of differences between the client’s expectations and what we’ve priced and committed to delivering. If only we knew all the details upfront…

So for this talk I will gather as many experiences and ideas from as many of us as possible – from one man bands to the larger agencies, developers and designers – we all need to pin down Discovery!

Discovering just what the client expects and all the things around being able to make that happen. That’s what we want to do.

The thing is, we all know this. Some include this already in their process and from this they have become successful (surely!!). Each of us has a horror story of the client’s expectations not being met because we did not understand quite what they had in mind; there was a mismatch and the client holds us accountable for that. Or what they want and expect is just not possible on their hosting. Or the client’s data needs significant translation to be usable.

Being clear at the start is essential. If we do this, document it, get the client to confirm that this document is what they want and understand they’re paying for, then we’re winning and so are they.

November 13, 2017 — Agile development principles tend to be associated with ongoing, iterative projects that evolve over time. But to a client looking for a team to ‘just build a website’, this approach can sound uncertain and expensive. An agency often needs to balance practical business development strategies with more progressive approaches to project and team management. We’ll explore how an agency can adopt agile principles even when a fully iterative process isn’t an option, benefits of these approaches, and how to shepherd client relationships toward a more adaptive mindset.

November 11, 2017 — Building a partnership takes an investment of time and energy for both the client & delivery agency. Earlier this year, Sage embarked on an ambitious programme to rebuild its entire online presence. Part of the plan was for a global WordPress multi-site.

This will be a discussion, co-presented by Sage (the client) and Pragmatic (the agency), which will provide a 360 view of a large WordPress project, covering both the technical and non-technical aspects. We’ll talk about the steps you can take when facing a hugely challenging project – facing up to tight timelines and translating multiple desires into a deliverable programme of work. We’ll look at how you can maximise your efficiency during production, leveraging the core functionality that WordPress provides and building on top of it, and how planning the architecture with an eye on the future can be the key to building partnerships. We’ll hear about the project from the client’s perspective as Sage will talk about their experiences – and from an agency perspective, delivering the work.

There were plenty of challenges along the journey on both sites – creating a custom WP API in a matter of days, training internal staff on new tools and migrating thousands of posts. But most of all, we’ll look at how we focused on building a partnership – creating trust and efficiency which benefited both sides.

October 7, 2017 — Vous est-il déjà arrivé de rencontrer un client qui veut un site qui fait « tout » ? D’assister à des conflits entre les différents départements qui veulent tous leur section du site ? D’avoir du mal à arrimer les besoins avec le budget ?

Le processus de « modélisation d’usage » est traditionnellement utilisée dans le développement de logiciel pour définir le Produit minimum viable (Minimum viable product ou MVP). Elle permet de recenser et prioriser des scénarios d’utilisation et des priorités d’affaires et s’avère extrêmement efficace pour planifier un site Web.

J’ai utilisé cette approche des dizaines de fois pour aider des clients à structurer leurs besoins, les prioriser et faire les évaluations budgétaires de projets. Dans cette séance, on apprendra à utiliser le processus de modélisation d’usage à l’aide d’exemples concrets.

Presentation Slides »