Introduction
In part 2 of our Democratizing series, we discuss the ways we are democratizing websites for our clients.
As we mentioned last week in our Democratizing Messaging post, our two driving principles are:
- Do what you’re good at
- Make work as easy as possible for the client
One of the ways we do this is by continuing our own education and experimentation. We always strive to be the cutting-edge experts our clients need and deserve.
But another is building our clients’ assets out to set them up for their own success on their own terms. And we originally started this process with our websites.
WordPress
All of our current clients will have heard us talk about how we use WordPress (and specifically Oxygen) to build out our websites. The reason is that we firmly believe it is best for them:
- WordPress is the most used website builder on the planet. (That’s right, I said planet.) This means that it’s also the best supported.
- It also means that our clients benefit from the fact that developers are creating new useful plugins all the time. The more this happens, the better, more specific-to-your-needs website functionality we can offer.
- Oxygen Builder in particular is wonderful, both because we aren’t limited by a specific template for our custom clients, and also because it’s a “lean” builder. That means faster loading speeds–a really big deal in today’s ecommerce world.
Hosting
We require all of our clients to host their websites with us. Which doesn’t sound like “democratizing” at all, does it? But this allows them to take their minds off of security and plugin updates. As much as we want to do what we’re good at, we want you to do the same. By taking this responsibility away from the client, it frees you to do more of what you’re good at, running your business.
User-friendly
We often tell our clients that there are two ways to build a website. The first is fast and easy. This may sound great–especially for those who want a website like…yesterday. But “fast and easy” for the developer almost always means “a nearly impossible pain-in-the-butt” for the client.
So we take a little more time to build our websites. We want to be able to “pass the keys” off to our clients in a way that gives them autonomy with their own content. We also provide a training session (or sometimes two) so that they have at least a basic understanding of how to do anything they might want to do on their own.
Conclusion
We are, of course, here for our clients who want us to make all their updates. But we’ve had so many conversations that start with “we have no idea how to update our website.” That kind of thing–where you can’t even make changes to a sales asset that you own breaks our hearts. So we’ll always be on the lookout for ways to make things more accessible and easier for you.
