I’ve gotten a basic draft for the sell sheet for the first template, which is based on my friend Angela’s website.
The basic idea is to provide an all-in-one package at a fixed price to very small businesses of one or two people (musicians, for example). I have arbitrarily set it to $75 in this example, and have attempted to list everything that is included in that for customization. There’s some stuff missing, in hindsight: the assumption that the client will provide photography, logo graphics, and text, for one. I can imagine having a slim book full of stuff like this.
There will also be developer documentation, detailing how the template “works” and how to maintain it.
Check out the PDF of this (work-in-progress) file if you’d like to see it in more detail. Discussion, as always, is welcome!
4 Comments
Dave:
Just FYI: my dabbling in web design failed in large part because I could NOT get clients to provide their own text. The procrastination that was preventing them getting a website in the first place was also preventing them getting copy written.
I never did figure out the way around that. Hope it goes better for you.
Amanda
Some ideas (my dabbling failed because of lack of energy, advertising and confidence):
Any and all advertising or networking they already do.
Newsletters and upcoming events. (Most webmasters charge $$$ to update a single page, and take forever to do it.) The ability to make a straight-forward change just by calling you is a big selling point. Neither of my two clients wanted to learn even simple editing.
Their satisfied clients, like a bride with serious food allergies thrilled the bakery could make a wheat-free cake. It’s a story their clients can identify with.
Amanda:
I found that was pretty typical when there is no head of marketing with the will or the responsibility of making decisions, for a variety of reasons. In those situations I sometimes would take the copy writing/copy editing task and write a rough “sacrificial draft”; it’s a lot easier for people to pick and refine ideas sometimes than to come up with them from scratch. This sometimes would be a significant part of the budget. Making someone promise to deliver something they are not comfortable or committed to is just asking for it. You’d think that they WOULD be, but it’s difficult stuff to do. I might just throw in the service now; it doesn’t take me long, and keeping in mind that the ultimate goal is to collect stories from interesting people, marketing isn’t that much further from it.
Cricket:
Perhaps I need to scale back “all-in-one”. What I was really thinking was “a complete shippable website”, not every marketing need that they have.
There’s two reasons for this: First, I think offering too much actually works AGAINST the initial sale for the solo business owner. There’s too much to shuffle through, and this creates resistance to the decision to “go”. The all-in-one web package should be like, “Say yes. Ok…it’s up. Done” at an affordable price for them and a reasonable amount of time from me. Secondly, the last thing I want to be is the “on-call” marketing/webmaster person for minimum wage. This might be something I can outsource, and if I provide rudimentary hosting services, perhaps changes can be included. Typically a maintenance contract is required, and at my old company we’d set a minimum # of hours per month in exchange for payment up front. I can’t imagine a small client going for that; however, it may seem more palatable if hosting is included AND source code is delivered to them, along with a final website dump should they decide to host elsewhere.
Agile Zen makes an online kanban board which would work for your focusing sheet (I like that name!).