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, 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 It's near enough identical for every client, so you build it once and duplicate it, and nothing in it goes out of date when the work changes. When that client comes back a year later for a second project, they don't get onboarded again. They just get a new project portal, and their contract and questionnaire answers stay exactly where they left them. The article covers what to put in an onboarding portal, what to leave out, and where to go once you've got one. 👉 Read the article and see the example onboarding portal​ There's also an example portal you can click through, if you'd rather skip the reading and take the structure. Hit reply if you get stuck on your own setup. Happy to look at a screenshot. -Laura P.S. We're building a template gallery, so portals like this one will be importable from inside your account rather than set up by hand. It's going to beta testers first. If you'd like to be one:
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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, 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...
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...