Introduction
At the end of a website project with clients there’s two options for what’s going to happen. Either you’re going to maintain the website for your client moving forward, or you’re going to hand-off the website to your client for them to manage themselves.
Now, if you’re the one managing it, then hunky dory, you built the website and now you’re the one who gets to manage that system.
But, for most client projects that I work on, I’m handing off the project to the client, which means I’m also handing off the keys to the website for the client to have full reign on. And this can be a problem, mainly because we want our clients to not be burning the website to the ground, and quite frankly they have the opportunity to do so.
So we’re going to cover all the steps to effectively hand-off a Webflow website to a client to ensure we know that it’s going to be in capable hands.
But first…
A Common Client Story
I’m going to start with a story, or at least a kind of story, and that story is about a kind of project and client that I’ve seen before. Here’s what happens:
A client, let’s call him Bob, has a design for their website of some sort and gets their design built in Webflow for as cheap as they can, maybe someone off of Upwork let’s say. So Bob gets the website fully built, launches it, has a quick party, and then wants to make updates of some kind because the website is a little rough around the edges.
Now since Bob doesn’t know how to use Webflow, he peeks inside the designer for a bit, realises he doesn’t know what he’s doing, and then goes to a new Webflow developer, because most of the website is done and now he just wants the few bugs on the website to be fixed, and hey maybe even add a page or two.
And this is where you or I come in, Bob shows us the website in Webflow, and it’s a complete mess, no system is used, there are new classes everywhere, and so it’s not something that we can really work on without properly stripping everything and starting again with a proper system.
So, step one to properly handing off a Webflow website is starting from a structure that makes sense, one that is built off of a system with rules.
1. Starting with a System
To do this you might use Finsweet’s Client First, or use Wizardry, or use something similar to these that works best for you.
The point is that you’re starting from a place of stability where everything has a reason, there are rules to be followed, and when you hand-off the website to the client you can show them that the website is built to last and that even they can understand and use it.
You should be using whatever system you want to use, and making sure that you understand the rules of whatever system you are using. If you don’t have the rules, then you won’t be able to show your client the rules, and the project can become a mess.
And if you think you’ll save time by not using a system, realise that using systems is the exact thing that helps to save us time, not waste it. When you are building on the fly, you have to add on styles for every new element, but when we use a system, we can re-use sections and elements that are the same.
