Having a good working relationship with your clients is essential. When they are happy, enthusiastic and confident in your work they are keen to continue working with you. Getting to that stage can take work though.

When I started my business 16 years ago I was encouraged to read some books about how to work effectively, how to grow the business and how to delegate tasks to stop bottlenecks. Among the books I read were the “eMyth Revisited", “Getting Things Done” and “The Lean Startup”. Each had something to say about productivity and how my work could be organised. I have managed OK, after a fashion with my own version of parking tasks that didn’t need doing immediately, asking lots of questions before starting the project and getting lots of feedback.

I worked out, roughly, that to get the answer to a problem, it might take 6 or more emails (back and forth) which could be reduced by picking up the phone and speaking to the customer, or just having a meeting.

Once upon a time having a meeting meant getting on a train sitting around a table, but now we all use Teams / Meetup / Zoom even that process is simpler. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the in-person meetings which gave some variety to my working days.

By meeting for a couple of hours we could discuss the current state of the client’s website, any plans they have for changes and any issues that had arisen. Several of my clients are happy to use meetings as a means of blocking out an hour or two and getting things done. Specific tasks such as “let’s get the main Training page to work with all our new courses” or “can we change the Team page with the new management structure”.

Working sessions revolve around discussing an issue, agreeing how it can be addressed, and completing the task. Though the feedback loop / validated learning in The Lean Startup relates more to product development, I found a way to apply this to these longer working sessions.

Some common scenarios that arise from speaking with clients about Joomla are:

1. How do I find the article / menu item that makes that page?
2. Can we change the font size or the colour of the text?
3. We need more space between these elements
4. Updating settings in a component

By meeting with the client to look at the issue I am able to combine solving the issue with showing how I did it and explaining the why or how. So in effect it’s a mini-training session. And training sessions are always better when there is a real-world requirement.

Over a few years we have added staff pages, pricelists, developed contact forms that might even hook into Salesforce and much more. My clients are happy to discuss the work we need to do using Joomla terminology and sometimes even read changelog information on updates to components so we all know what changes may occur with an update.

While it can feel like your client is keeping a close eye on what you’re doing, I have learnt that by sharing the experience of making updates they can understand what is involved in making changes and how a seemingly complicated task can be done quickly. Sharing the process of updating and developing with the client can make them happier, more trusting and confident that the website works the way they want it to. This has worked very well for me while working on Joomla websites and I believe it has helped my clients love Joomla.