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).
The webinar recording is up!
|
Hey Reader, The recording from yesterday's webinar is now available: It's about 30 minutes. The chat and comments refused to work for the entire session (sorry!), so we never got to the Q&A, which means you're getting it by email instead. Reply with whatever you wanted to ask and I'll answer properly. What I covered:Dedicated onboarding portals. If you work with the same clients repeatedly, a separate onboarding portal keeps the first-week paperwork away from the ongoing project. Fewer pages for the client to navigate, less clutter for you. If you want a look at how one is put together, here's the onboarding portal template. Synced patterns for global updates. Change a block of content once and it updates across every portal using that pattern. Handy for contact details, standard instructions, anything you'd otherwise have to edit forty times. There's a help doc on this here, with a video coming shortly, and the recording walks through the setup. What's new since you last looked: dynamic client tags and private comments, both of which came in recently. What's coming next:A template gallery is in the works, which will replace the current business of exporting and importing XML files. One click, portal set up. There's no date on it yet, but it's getting really close. Also on the list: a migration tool for anyone moving to the block editor, and improvements to how the backend handles things when you're running a lot of portals at once. That last one is less exciting to describe and rather more useful in practice. Questions?The chat let us all down, so this is the second attempt. Reply and ask. I read everything. And if you're not using Client Portal yet, have a look ☺️ --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, 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...