I saw a post in the DTU Facebook group by Melissa Love that talked about how she developed and produced ‘most’ of her client websites in 2 days.

This intrigued me so I set about putting her plan into action. Her  post talks about how many of us web site producers suffer from the dreaded content issue – i.e. the lack of it.

Now, Melissa deals exclusively with Photographers so her methodology is well practised, thought out and adhered to.

With most of us NOT specialising in a particular genre, it can prove to be difficult but, let me take you through a process that I went through just the other day.

1. Contact the client with a theme to go from – in this case it was Flourish from Nathan Duvall
2. Tell the client that you want content and images to match the layout of the theme and when you want them by (I gave my client 5 working days)
3. Once all content is all present and correct, make an appointment for them to sit with you and go through the page titles, content and images that they want to use from the ones they have supplied.
4. Meet for one day to set the site up – we did this in a serviced office of Regus at a cost of £65.00 for the day, we completed the layout using images supplied that were not high res and were watermarked so that the client could go away and think about the layout, content, colour ways and tone of voice.
5. Arrange a meeting for one week later
6. Meet in the Regus office again, slightly higher cost as the room was bigger of £120 for the day – Regus supply free coffee, client supplied lunch!
7. Finalise layout, content, add necessary plugins and integrate with Ontraport, Leadpages (I Know!) and employ the services of Colin Falcon to fix the Bloom opt in that I broke.
8. Took a back up of the original website, cloned the new site and installed it on the live server
9. Launch Site at designated time of 5pm on the 2nd day of development
10. BOOM!

So, how did we get there:

I used a child theme, it already had a great layout, calls to action and design elements. I installed this prior to meeting with my client on a dev server.

The client did as requested and supplied all content, professional photographs and all logins to ontraport, leadpages and their video learning solution. We went at it with gusto and a certain knowledge that we had set aside two valuable days to get it done. The client also realises that our time, effort and skill set are well worth the cost of launching this site. Without our knowledge, resources and of course added benefit of SEO skills, the site build would not have happened in time for the client to launch their new product – let alone a well needed revamp on their site.

I guess my message to clients and developers is to not be afraid to work from a template theme be it a child theme or one that comes straight out of the box – the value we add as web site developers is our ability to focus on what our client requires and when they require it. Not, building web sites from the ground up!

Cost to client: £1500.00

Cost to us:
Theme £50.00 or a portion thereof as we already bought it and used it on two other projects.
Office hire: £185.00
Developer time: £75.00 (I properly broke Bloom!)

So all in all a good exercise and I would recommend anyone to try it out on their next project.

You can visit the finished item here: www.2be2serve.com

If you have a good idea that helps us produce things faster that you would like to share, pop it in the comments below.

Andrew Palmer

Andrew is the founder of Elegant Marketplace.