We have been stunned by how popular the White Label CMS plugin has been, and have added what we think is the best feature yet.
You can now specify which menu appear for your clients when they login to the CMS. You will never have to explain what comments and links mean to a client when you are using WordPress as a website CMS!
As you know by know, at Video User Manuals, we really believe that time is money, that is why we created these simple CMS profiles which will automatically remove the menu items for you with one click.
The WordPress Manual Plugin first evolved because we wanted to both provide our clients with the best experience of using WordPress as a CMS, and just as importantly we wanted to reduce the costs of managing the education of our clients in using their CMS.
Over 20,000 WordPress consultants have downloaded the eBooks and some of them have left testimonials about how much they love them. Read their comments here.
We also have evolved other techniques which have helped both of these goals, and have decided to share them with you. The following is the culmination of over 6 years worth of experience.
It offers advice to businesses on how to streamline their processes while giving their clients a better impression of their brand though a smoother handover.
A Better WordPress For Clients
How to customise the WordPress dashboard to give your clients the best (non-confusing!) experience.
Using a WordPress setup checklist will make your installations more efficient.
How to move menu positions in WordPress.
Implement basic Search Engine Optimisation techniques to give your clients better results
How to get the most out of the WordPress Manual Plugin
A Better Business For Developers
How to qualify leads
Sending proposals
Payment Terms
Client sign off
Lots more!
How To Sell WordPress To Clients
How to explain WordPress to clients in one page.
What to focus on in your sales pitch.
An interview with Tammy Hart, about her WordCamp presentation “WordPress & Working With Clients”
How to handle questions for your clients in an efficient manor. (cut your maintenance costs)
Got Any Tips Of Your Own?
We would love to get your feedback on some of our recommendations, please let us know what you think.
As part of our series about giving your clients the best experience with a WordPress powered CMS, we thought we would share how we present our websites to our clients. Throughout this article we offer you our tips on how to improve your processes and advice based on our experience.
Our main aim initially was to provide WordPress instructions for clients by providing a great experience for our clients using their WordPress CMS. We realised that first impressions really count. So this is what our current site deployments have a heavily customised dashboard which looks like:
We hope you have noticed the following things about this dashboard:
We customise the header and footer logo
We remove all the panels from the dashboard and add in our own welcome panel which is personalised for the client
The welcome panel contains links to the important areas in the CMS
We have a clear link to edit the homepage
We have a clear link to the page manager (sitemap)
We have a complete video tutorial suite accessible where the client needs it most (in the actual CMS)
We give our clients Editor only access
As a small business owner you should be looking to develop processes which are easy to replicate, save you time and money. This dashboard has evolved because we were constantly looking to improve on our process. We will outline ways for you to improve your processes below.
Custom Logos
Which feels more personalised?
Now there are lots of plugins out there which will allow you to do this, but we were looking for something that was very simple. Every plugin out there gave us more functionality than we actually needed. We did not need to waste time changing anchor colours, or background colours, the current WordPress colour scheme is excellent. So we built our own plugin (the White Label CMS plugin).
We always modify the login and header logo to be the clients logo. We also felt it was necessary from our own branding point of view to place our logo in the footer of the CMS, and also provide a link to our website, just as way of making sure the client would not forget us for any future projects they might have.
We wanted to make sure that during the design process, we could create a logo for the login and a logo for the header, place them into the images directory of the active theme, and then not have to think about it.
Process: Always upload a custom login, custom header logo, and your company logo to the active theme. Then install the White Label CMS plugin
Removing All Panels From The Dashboard
For us, the lack of documentation and the cluttered dashboard was always the achilles heel of WordPress as a CMS. It felt wrong to keep telling clients to ignore the dashboard. A partial solution is provided by WordPress itself. You can simply remove the panels from the dashboard using the Screen Options tab:
However removing all the panels was only marginally better than having all of them there. What we needed was our own custom panel on the dashboard to personally welcome the clients to their CMS. Again, we looked around for a plugin to do this, but in the end decided to incorporate it into our White Label CMS plugin.
Most of our builds are actually websites rather than blogs, so we prefer to remove all dashboard panels. However if your client does have a blog attached to their site, then you may consider it necessary to leave some panels on. We have found from our own experience that the clients are really only interested in any comments left on their blog posts, and that is clearly visible on left navigation.
The welcome panel we use also has a link to the clients google analytics account, giving them a better experience by having everything in the one place.
Process:Remove all panels from the dashboard and insert your own welcome panel.
Process:Have a generic text file where you store the text for your welcome panel, so it is a simple copy and paste and adding the clients name if appropriate.
Group All Main Menu Sections Below The Dashboard
When we first started to develop our own plugins, they would all sit at the bottom of the menu system. Telling the client to always use the links at the bottom of the menu felt counter intuitive. Normally the most important links are at the top!
For each site we usually have 3 main menus for:
Editing the homepage
Editing the site structure
Viewing the video tutorials
The client can usually run their CMS through those 3 links. It makes sense for us to group them together at the top, and we have had nothing but positive feedback from our clients ever since.
We will go into more detail about how to do this in a future article. There are some technical reasons why you should not do this, the main one being that if WordPress updates, you may overwrite one of the existing sections. However we are comfortable doing this, and we think it provides our clients the best experience.
Process:Find your own way of standardising your WordPress iinstallations (ie. making plugins that you control) and make it easily reproducible.
Have A Clear Link To Edit The Homepage
We have developed this solution over a long period of time and we are sure it will continue to evolve. Most solutions out there are based on having excerpts from existing posts or pages inserted into the homepage, however in a lot of cases, there are extra pieces of information you want to add which are specific to the homepage which don’t fit with in a post or page. If the client wanted to update their homepage it meant doing it in different places, confusion usually reigned.
Our solution was to develop a page which handles all elements of the homepage. If you want to do this yourself, there is a brilliant article here which explains how to set up a options page in WordPress. We just adapted this ourselves.
We feel that the most important thing about this page is that is easily customisable. Each website requires something slightly different, but we can simply add a couple more lines to the setup array, and it will appear in the homepage options menu. So adapting this for each client takes seconds rather than hours like it used to.
By providing an options page you give the client the ability to change the homepage, but at the same time you restrict what they can actually change as well. We have used drag and drop solutions in the past for all clients to modify the homepage, but 90% of them never used them, and the 10% that did, usually ended up calling us because it did not behave the way they expected.
Process:Create your own flexible solution for the homepage which future projects can use.
Advice:Don’t be afraid to say no to clients when they ask for extra functionality. Sometime it is better (cheaper) for everyone if the developer comes in and makes the requested change, rather than building in the functionality to make it possible … if it is ever requested.
Have A Clear Link To The Page Manager
Finally, with the coming of WordPress 3, developers will have a built in solution for this, so we will not go into much detail about it right now. We are sure that like us, you have tested every plugin available, and in the end chosen a hybrid of the best ones. We use a variation of PageMash, with a few modifications we felt were necessary, like being able to have short menu titles, and choose how the left navigation was outputted.
Process:Choose a page manager, preferably one that is established, and make it part of your installation process and stick with it. This way you know your video tutorials will always be valid for the next client.
Have A Clear Link To The Video Tutorials
Tutorials are essential if you want to have a professional handover to your client, and will save you time and therefore money. If you look around this website, you will see lots of information about the video tutorials plugin we provide. We are sure you have gone through a similar process of constantly producing custom tutorials for clients and underestimating how long this all takes. Also, WordPress 3 is coming, so you are going to have to remake them all anyway! The sales pitch ends here!
Process:Create generic tutorials for you WordPress CMS that incorporate the main functionality of the site and can be reused for future clients.
Advice: Create a simple subdomain where you can make you generic videos, and which is permanent, so you can create new videos in the future with the same look and feel.
Advice: Don’t use Jing for your tutorials. That 5 minute time limit forces you to rush, and it will not sound professional.
This is an example of how use our Video User Manuals plugin. In a future post we will explain how to get the most out of the plugin:
There are a couple of important things to note:
The client has a comprehensive video and written manual accessible from the dashboard
We have created 2 generic videos which cover how to use the homepage and the sitemap which are specific to the way we build websites.
We have adapted the plugin so it contains these videos in the config file, so no modifications are needed to the plugin, it is just a case of installing it, and everything will appear correctly. This saves valuable time.
Give Clients Editors Access Only
The vast majority of our clients are not specialists in IT, and are really only interested in having a website that looks great, and so presents a good image of the company. They don’t care if their plugins are up to date, or the fact they can have links in their blog roll.
The less unnecessary options available to the client, the less opportunities for confusion. This is why we usually give our clients just the Editors login, not the Admin login.
How Do You Do It?
So we have shown you the way we hand over our websites to our clients, and in the future articles in this series we will go into more depth about the some of the points made here, but for now we would love to hear how you hand over your sites to your clients.
This article is meant for power users of the WordPress Manual Plugin. You do not have to modify the config.php file, as there is a options page that is built into the manual and all changes can be made there. However, for companies who do lots of deployments of website for clients, this process will save you even more time.
Our config.php file always has the serial number in as well, but for obvious reason we left in out in the video above.
Customisation Using The Config.php
Please note that if you modify the config.php file, after you have installed the plugin, you will need to click the reset button, in order to use any modifications you made in the config.php file.
It was only due to popular demand (and the ability to easily update the plugin) that we actually added a options page to the plugin. We don’t actually use it ourselves, because we really value our own time.
We have one master copy of the plugin which sits on our intranet. We have already made the following changes in the config.php file.
Our serial code
Show Blogging Videos is set to false – We do not always give our clients blogging functionality
Our custom logo URL – which appears above the videos
Our logo in the custom plugin heading logo – We point it to the themes/images directory and use the same image as the custom footer logo from our White Label CMS plugin
Our own image for the Custom Ebook Image – We point this to our main server.
We also modify the Custom Videos in the config.php to include 2 videos. The first one about how to edit the homepage, the second about how to use our page plugin. We host these videos and thumbnails on our Amazon S3 account. We use the photoshop thumbnail file we provided to make the thumbnails so our videos look consistent with the other videos.
The only other piece of customisation we do on the plugin which is not included in the document, is make the plugin appear below the dashboard in the menu system. How to do this will be discussed in a future blog post.
Got Any Power Tips Of Your Own – Please Share Them
In anticipation of WordPress 3 launching, we have taken some time to make a quick video explaining how WordPress 3 will affect the type of CMS you can produce for your clients in the future.
There are lots of great changes, but the most important 2 are the new menu system and the ability to make custom posts.
WordPress 3 Menu System
As you can see from the video the functionality is still a bit buggy, but that is what a beta release is for! The menu system is finally a single solution that developers can give to their clients. It does open up a couple of interesting issues:
Menu Is Not Accessible By Editors
The menu is part of the Appearance menu, which as we all know is only available if you are logged in as the admin. We have always recommended that you give your clients the editors login if possible, however we might have to change that recommendation in the future.
We are actually having an internal debate here as to whether the menus should be include in the next version of the WordPress Manual Plugin. Right now we only cover functionality that a Editor would see. We would love to hear your feedback about it.
[poll id=”3″]
Adding Pages To Menus Workflow
The workflow for this will be pretty simple. The client will just create a page, then go to the menu system and add that page to the menu system. We are sure it will not be long, before you can choose to add a page to a menu directly from the editing screen, but for now that is not possible.
WordPress 3 Custom Posts
This is really the thing that is going to revolutionise WordPress. From a developer point of view this is what has been missing for a long time. But know it is here let your imagination run riot!
As you can see from the video, we created a directory where you can add in a number of elements easily. It took us only 1 hour to do and we would like to acknowledge this great post which inspired it.
Another obvious application would be a homepage option, where clients would be able to homepage directly from the WordPress menu. We have all come up with our solutions for this in the past, so it is going to be great that there will be some standardisation for this now.
The reason why this is so important is because a lot of developers who refused to use WordPress before, will now be more open to using it. More developers, means more plugins and more themes, which means more users and the whole ball will start rolling.
We hope you have enjoyed the overview, and would love to hear your feedback.
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