Laura Elizabeth is a designer and the founder of 3 products: Client Portal (a super simple way to store your clients' deliverables), Design Academy (a design course for developers), and Project Pack (sets of templates and documents for freelancers and agencies).
How to create an onboarding portal for your clients
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Hey Reader, Whatever you sell, and however you've structured it, onboarding sits outside all of it. It isn't one of your services. It's what happens before any of them start, and it runs more or less the same way no matter what the client ends up buying. Same contract, same questionnaire, same request for logos and brand files, same explanation of how you work and how quickly you reply to things. You've probably written that explanation eight times in eight different emails. Which is a good argument for building it once, in one place, separate from the project work. Onboarding finishes. Project work doesn't, at least not for months, and the two don't need to live in the same document. And when a client comes back next year, they don't need onboarding again. They already know how you work. I've written up what that looks like in practice, including what belongs in an onboarding space and what doesn't. 👉 Read the article and see the live onboarding portal example​ We build client portals for a living, so the live example inside is a Client Portal one. It's definitely worth a look even if you go and build the same structure somewhere else entirely. Hit reply if you've got questions about any of it. -Laura |
Laura Elizabeth
Laura Elizabeth is a designer and the founder of 3 products: Client Portal (a super simple way to store your clients' deliverables), Design Academy (a design course for developers), and Project Pack (sets of templates and documents for freelancers and agencies).
Hey Reader, If you've set up Client Portal and then stalled on what to put in it, build the onboarding one first. Most of us sell some version of a core service plus a few extras, or a handful of separate services. But onboarding sits outside all of that. It isn't something you sell, it's what happens before any of it starts, and it runs the same way no matter which service the client ends up buying. That's what makes it the easiest portal to build. It's near enough identical for every...
Hey Reader, A little while back, Cheryl Porcelijn had me on De Podcast voor Webdesigners - her weekly podcast for web designers. It's normally in Dutch, but this episode is in English, and we talked about Client Portal: how it got started, what it's actually for, and some of the ways people are using it that I didn't originally anticipate. Cheryl has been using Client Portal with her own web design clients for years - and more recently as a companion to her course - so the conversation felt...
Hey Reader, You may have seen Cheryl's case study a few weeks back - she runs a six-month coaching programme and uses Client Portal for its delivery. Tucked into that email was a link to a free template for setting up the same kind of thing. It's actually becoming one of our more popular downloads, but plenty of you missed it the first time round. So this email is just about the template. If you're running something educational on the side (coaching, group programmes, light-touch courses) the...