Restructure Website Development Services, Pricing, & Partnerships

One of the first client meetings I lead on my own at the agency was a web development project. Now, I have to be honest here, I had no idea what I was doing. I had taken a few classes in college and aside from being picky about user-experience and having an eye for design, my role was really to listen to the client and translate back to our contracted developer at the time.

I started taking courses, learning more coding languages, and meeting with developers to just get a better understanding for the website design and development process. Over the years, Chatterkick had almost every structure you can imagine of a website team. Independent contractors, full-time developers, even purchased a developer business at one point in time, web request database, agency partnerships, a hybrid model of in-house project managers and independent contractors, it just didn’t work. It was either a terrible experience for clients, a terrible experience for contractors, or an inability to bridge the gap and translate between the two.

I dove in and did an entire autopsy of this service. I re-pulled metrics over the past 5 years to review our revenue, cost, profit margins, customer satisfaction, percentage of customers that became retainers, contractor/partnership feedback, and dug into each service line item we were providing.

In the end, I identified multiple services that didn’t align with the vision of the company and that didn’t have dedicated infrastructure or team members to support. Those team members were spending 80% of their time on other services, the web services became a detractor of their ability to really kill it in their role. Not only that, but our profits were extremely misaligned with the industry standard and effort required to achieve client happiness.

Here’s what happened next…

- Developed website plan for signed clients (strategy, agendas, questionnaire, website timeline, asset requirements, feedback questionnaire sent upon launch)

• Eliminated WordPress Development and identified partners and contractors to refer clients to that require WordPress sites. Identified a WordPress maintenance partner to provide better experience.

• Re-aligned website hosting services and established new web maintenance packages. Helped clients set up their own hosting assets and partnerships or moved them into maintenance packages that were better-aligned with their needs. This project generated $30k+ in revenue and a 200% growth in profit margin for the service.

• Created new Squarespace website pricing and packaging structures, add-ons, and expectations for the sales team. These packages were easier to identify solutions that directly satisfied client needs, provided scalable and repeatable expectations, and were more affordable, and attractive website package for clients. I developed a simple, templated structure for these packages which really streamlined the sales process.

• Met with over 50 designers and vetted a strong web partnership network of a dozen designers to improve the efficiency, quality, and speed of executing the new Squarespace packages.

• Developed project management workflows, SEO checklists, and website launch checklists.