And I’m not talking about food.
Last week at WordPress Wednesdays, a local meet up for WordPress users and developers held at CoCo one of my colleagues was wondering if the business model for building websites was sustainable in the face of huge disparity between what we in the US have to charge to make a living and what some of the designers offshore charge. Good question.
It’s one faced by most American businesses today. I had the question in mind when I was talking with another friend about his business and how he needed to charge more for his website work. I was reminding him of all the things that go into creating a WordPress site and one of the things that i brought up was training. If you’re building small simple sights, training the customer to use the site might take longer than actually building it. And you have to do it if you want to do your job right. You can create the greatest tool ever made, the answer to every problem your customer has, but it’s just a smoking turd if they don’t know how to use it. I call it the “seduced and abandoned syndrome.” Clients get fired up about a dazzling array of functionality and visual pizzaz and then the developer hands it off and walks away, leaving them without a clue how to make it work to solve their business problem.
What’s the best way to train something? I guess it depends on the trainee’s learning style, but I believe the most effective way to teach someone almost anything is face to face and hands on. Something that just doesn’t work over the ether from the other side of the globe.
To be successful in the face of stiff price competition you need to show that you can provide value to the customer and that even though you’re more expensive you’re worth it. Offering face to face training and being accessible to the client during the early days after you hand off the site to them is a great way to provide value and to build trust with your client. That’s easier to do across town than across the International Date Line.
Make sure your clients know you provide that service and how important it is.
I’ll have a kale and tofu salad with that, please.
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