I get pretty frustrated with potential clients. I get a lot of silly contact emails asking about help with their site. They almost always start off with something like “I’m pretty good managing my own site but….”. Then they outline what they can’t get to work, tell me it is a “little job” but could you do it? Of course I can do it! You, the client, have experience with one site with one, generally crappy, theme. I have experience with hundreds. I always reply that I can help them and that I charge by the hour but by the minute with a one hour minimum charge.
Then they almost always come back with this laundry list of lots of things they want done to get their WordPress site right. And they always conclude with something like “I don’t think this is much work, what are your thoughts”. Really, really? YOU don’t think it is much work and YOU have spent weeks trying to get these things done. Interestingly, I just had one who included “and if you are an expert, it will be easy, right?” Then, finally, they often conclude with something like “Note: I love the site design the way it is – so I am not seeking any new design changes unless we agree together. It took me weeks to create this on my own. 🙂 “. See that? WEEKS. Then I look at the site and it is a 4 page site with a blog using a crappy free theme that is just sucker bait for the upgrade to the pro version, and of course these kind of clients won’t upgrade.
UGH. ?
I typically don’t get the job because I write back a comprehensive answer that is not “yep, I can do it for about 50 bucks” which is what they want to hear. ?
In general, however, I endeavor with all of my talents to make it easy for users like that to maintain and update their own sites. One of the things they trip over is Sidebars and Widget boxes. One of the biggest aids for these customers is the Black Studio Tinymce Widget Plugin, By default, the text widget is the WordPress way of updating text plugins and any styling has to be done with html and css in the text widget. Yeah, most users don’t get that. The Black Studio widget gives them the same interface as the WordPress Visual Editor.
A good example of where *I* use this widget is Banner updates. Today I updated the Fast Fix Web Design banner from a Winter banner to a Valentines’ day banner. Without the Black Studio widget, I would have to have had uploaded the new banner and then manually sub out the href link to the new image, With the Black Studio widget, it was identical to the updating a Visual Editor image.
Clients that choose Fast Fix Web Design, end up liking how easy we make it for them to update their own websites!