This is the second in a 5-part Series on Things to Consider Before Hiring a Web Designer. You can catch the whole series in episodes 106 – 110.
For those of you that don’t know, in addition to this podcast, I not only teach WordPress through my 5 Day Website Challenge, but I also do one-on-one client work, and what pains me the most is when someone comes to me desperate because they’ve had a bad experience with another web designer.
In episode 106, I likened a web design project to a construction project. There’s a lot of planning and preparation that must be done before you can even start building. If all of those decisions aren’t made up front, and all the things that go into the house haven’t been manufactured or ordered and gathered and organized, you can’t build the house! The project stalls out, people get angry and it’s not a good situation.
As a web designer, here are some common pitfalls I see that can cause a web design project to stall out – and look, I’ve been there too!!! I’m not immune to this stuff – but that’s the beauty of it because I can help you avoid my pain so that you can have an awesome, amazing experience building your online home!
Pitfall #1: Biting off more than you can chew.
I’m so guilty of this. I get an idea, I get so excited about it and I go into GO MODE. I don’t know if you follow Emmy Wu, but if you don’t, you totally should. She teaches DIY video to entrepreneurs – so how to make videos, light them, edit them, storyboard them, all that stuff. Shoutout to Emmy!!
So one day I see that she’s offering a video production package where she walks you through scripting and shooting your video, and then you send it off to her team to be professionally edited – and they create a logo animation.
So I’m like YES!!!!! I’m totally in. THIS is what I need to really get the message out there – VIDEO for facebook ads, etc.
I can’t give her my money fast enough.
At this point I’m still working full time, I’ve got this HUGE project at my day job and my own web design clients AND the whole reason I’m even wanted these videos is because I’m updating and relaunching my 5 Day Website Challenge.
So she and her team are amazing, they get me all set up with the project, they walk me through what they’ll need from me to create my videos, and we set dates for my deliverables and I’m like, YEP, YEP, sure, yep, that timeline sounds great.
And so…
I’m working 50 hours a week, I’ve only got mornings and weekends for my side hustle, I’ve got my own client projects that I was putting before my stuff because I wasn’t scheduling those properly… And to give Emmy’s team what they needed, I had to script out 3 videos, record them (and do it well, with like good lighting and composition), find music, find b-roll that matches my brand, give them my logo etc. and get them all of this content.
Talk about stressful, OMG!! I totally bit off more than I could chew. And the reason for that is because I had NO PLAN.
I got excited, I jumped into something that I didn’t have space in my life for.
And I see this with my own web design clients also. And I get it. I LOVE the enthusiasm. But that energy can turn stressful so quickly when you haven’t made the space for the project in your life.
So what I want you to take away from this is – no matter how excited you are about getting your website done, make sure the timing is right for you. Make sure that you have the space cleared to give it your full attention because if not, you’re at risk of a few things:
One, not having the time to pull together all of the content that your designer needs to build your site. In episode 108 I talk about all of the things you’ll need to prepare as part of your web design project – and it’s going to take you some time to pull it all together.
This can delay your project significantly, and delays can be costly whether your designer charges for delays or you simply miss lucrative opportunities because your project has stalled out.
Because think about this from their perspective. You book a project with them, and they block off all of that time on your calendar. Then it comes time to start, and they don’t have what they need from you.
And that time block was saved for your project, and it’s come and gone and they can’t re-sell that time to someone else, it’s in the past. Not only that, now they have to assign future time to your project that could have been sold to someone else, and so they are losing even more money.
So to mitigate that, your project gets back-burnered – and suddenly you get a fire lit under you because some opportunity came up for you that requires your website to be done, but now your designer’s not available because they are working on another project!!
And like I said earlier, I’m guilty of this with my video project. I was able to get content to them for the first two videos, but not the third, and then the whole project stalled out. In fact, we never finished and I’m going to share how that turned out as well.
But this brings me to Pitfall number two.
Pitfall #2: Rushing – having too soon of a deadline.
If you’ve found that you rushed into a big project, typically it’s because you’ve got something coming up that you want to have a website ready for. Maybe your book is being published, or you’re launching a course or an event. So now that date has been set, and you don’t have a website, or your website needs a makeover, or whatever the case may be.
For me, it was that I was relaunching my course, and I wanted to do a 3-part video ad series. So I had the double whammy of not clearing the space, and also having too tight of a turnaround time.
But being the good student that I am, I turned my homework in on time. But the quality?
Awful. The lighting in my videos was all wrong, the composition was off, I sounded like a robot because I was reading a teleprompter app because I had quickly written a script that wasn’t really ME so I had a hard time memorizing it.
The whole thing was forced.
And so what do you think I thought when the videos came back?
They were expertly edited, the b roll was in all the right places, the music was on point – but when it came to me… Ugh. And I’m not being overly critical here like I can tend to be. These videos were BAD because I rushed it. I squeezed it in and didn’t give it the time and attention it deserved.
So in giving my revisions, I asked Emmy’s team if I could give them new videos. And they said yes, for a fee, which sounded totally fair to me because that’s extra work for them.
And 3 months later, I still hadn’t gotten it together to give them quality videos? Um, nope! They followed up with me, I kept pushing the date back, and finally, we mutually agreed to close the project.
Here’s the exact email I sent:
“Hey Emmy!!! So sorry for the delay in responding – I'm still totally swamped with my day job and side projects. Please go ahead and release the time on the calendar and we can consider the project closed. I understand that I'm the reason it didn't get completed. It's a lesson learned for me to make sure I'm more prepared and have adequate time set aside to engage in these projects – and to make sure my vision is very clear before starting.
It was a pleasure working with you and your team, Emmy!”
And it was such a relief, you have no idea!!
So the key takeaway here again is to not only make sure that you’ve made space in your life for the project but that you give yourself adequate time to dedicate to prepare everything you need to pull together for your project.
So in that email, you’ll notice that I said, “It's a lesson learned for me to make sure I'm more prepared and have adequate time set aside to engage in these projects – and to make sure my vision is very clear before starting.”
That leads me to pitfall number 3:
Pitfall #3: Identity Crisis
The third very common thing that I see with clients is that once it’s time for the rubber to meet the road so to speak, they begin to lose confidence in what they were once so sure about. They start second-guessing and overthinking their every decision, from their business name to their services to their logo design.
And here’s where I want to give you a little pep talk, and also caution you.
The pep talk is that you gotta believe in yourself!!! You were CONFIDENT when you made those decisions in the first place, before you had to dig in and put tons of time and energy into creating the content for your website! That whole process of birthing your website can be overwhelming and exhausted and stressful because let’s face it, it’s a lot of work for you as the client! You’re making decisions that determine how you’re going to do business and there are a lot of details.
So go back to that place of confidence that you had before you started. And also, understand that sometimes you have to put the thing out there into the world and get feedback on it before you’ll really know how you want to change it. It may not be a perfect fit the first time around.
Of course, as web designers, we do our best to anticipate your needs and help you make those decisions, but there’s always going to be something that sounded like a good idea at first, and then didn’t work out the way you expected. That’s OKAY.
So here’s where I’ll caution you. If you give in to bully in your head, the fear, that’s telling you that you picked the wrong name, or that your services are all wrong or that your this isn’t perfect or that’s not right – and I’m not talking about picking apart a design or giving feedback on a draft, I’m talking about the kind of identity crisis that’s going to stop you from even being able to deliver your content or launch your site, it’s going to cost you money. Delays are costly. Revisions are costly. And that’s why it’s so important to be really clear on your business and how you market to clients and how you serve them before you even engage a web design project – which is a topic I’m covering in Episode 109.
So to recap, when you’re starting to think about hiring someone to build your website, it’s so important that you’re not biting off more than you can chew. That you can clear the space in your life for this project. And if you’re working with me, you’re going to need to make space for 3 whole months, where the first month, you’re doing the heavy lifting on your content. And also think about making space for marketing and driving traffic to your website after it’s live.
Just as important to clearing the space in your life is giving yourself a big enough lead time. If you want to hit the ground running in January, the time to start on your website is July!! I get so bummed out when I have to tell a client who contacts me in October with a January launch date that no, it won’t be possible to complete the project on that short of a time frame with holidays. If you want to hit the ground running in January, ideally you’ll want to have your website done mid-November so that YOU have time over the holidays to enjoy them and plan and prepare to market starting in January.
Finally, making sure that you’re really clear on your vision before you hire someone is key. You don’t have to know the technical ins and outs, but you do have to know HOW you’ll market to and work with clients so that your designer can build the foundation you need.
And TRUST YOURSELF. If you were clear when you started the project, don’t let the actual project overwhelm you and make you second guess yourself!! YOU have the right answers. Trust yourself.
Today’s pep talk is brought to you by Bluehost. Go to www.shannonmattern.com/bluehost and get 36 months of web hosting for just $2.95 a month. That’s less than one trip to Starbucks a month – and if you’re anything like me, you’re at Starbucks more than that!
Then you can sign up for my Free 5 Day Website Challenge at www.shannonmattern.com/5day and I’ll show you step by step how to get started building your new website for your side hustle.
