[00:00:09.390] - Gordon
Hello.

[00:00:10.230] - Taylor
Hello.

[00:00:10.230] - Gordon
My name's Gordon from Drayson Design.

[00:00:12.390] - Taylor
And I'm Taylor from The Creative Tinker.

[00:00:14.580] - Gordon
And welcome to "This Week With Taylor and Gordon," a weekly podcast and vidcast where we talk about things that have happened in the last seven days as business owners. It's been a busy week for you and I, hasn't it?

[00:00:27.030] - Taylor
Yeah, very much.

[00:00:28.010] - Gordon
Um, do you want to, uh, do you want to tell us a little bit about what you've been up to?

[00:00:32.640] - Taylor
So this week I had a meeting, and not just any meeting. I had a 'top table' meeting. So part of my BNI group, we have something called the leadership team and they are the people that chair the meeting. They kind of run the chapter, deal with finances, things like that. And our current leadership team's term is coming to an end and we are changing. So we're going to be getting a new top table. And I was approached by the top table to be the secretary. So I am now the new secretary of my BNI chapter.

[00:01:12.400] - Gordon
Wow, that's very exciting. So just to let you know, BNI is a networking meeting. They meet once a week. It's a breakfast meeting. Your one, isn't it?

[00:01:22.590]
Yes. So each chapter has different days, but they are in the mornings and normally we would meet in the room and have breakfast. But at the moment we are on Zoom.

[00:01:33.630] - Gordon
So you're having your own breakfast in front of your computer?

[00:01:36.210] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:01:36.770] - Gordon
Ok.

[00:01:37.200] - Taylor
So this top table meeting was basically old top table meeting with the new top table. And they basically just went through kind of, what we needed to do, things to look out for, things that they'd learnt, and if we had any questions, kind of answering them.

[00:01:52.140] - Gordon
So what does a secretary need to do?

[00:01:54.340] - Taylor
So secretary role, basically is for making sure people pay their monthly bills, so for example, we have, when we're in the room, we, you have to pay £10 a week for your breakfast. That includes the entire breakfast and also goes towards paying the venue. I have to, any memberships, so people want to renew I deal with that, and kind of managing the Zoom meetings at the moment. So that would be kind of putting people into breakout rooms and things like that.

[00:02:35.130] - Gordon
OK. Well done. Congratulations.

[00:02:38.050] - Taylor
Yes, it's very exciting.

[00:02:38.880] - Gordon
It's very exciting. Yeah. And that will also increase the number of people who know who you are and what you do.

[00:02:45.810] - Taylor
Yeah, definitely.

[00:02:47.680] - Gordon
Very good.

[00:02:48.180] - Taylor
How about you this week, what have you been up to?

[00:02:50.420] - Gordon
So this week has been mainly taken up with renewals. Now, this is something I don't think we've discussed before, but hosting a website has several different costs involved. So one of them is the domain name, which is, for example, for me 'draysondesign.com,' that is the actual name. And you have to pay an annual or biannual fee for that. And that allows you to use that domain name for everything else.

[00:03:23.780] - Taylor
Doesn't have to be just two years. You can pay up to 10 years.

[00:03:26.780] - Gordon
This is true. This is true. I normally do two years.

[00:03:30.200] - Taylor
But no, no more than 10 years at a time.

[00:03:32.240] - Gordon
No more than 10 at a time, and no less than one. You have to do it for at least one year. So that's one cost that's involved. Another cost is hosting of the website. So that is all the files that are, that make up your website. So when people type in your domain name, they go to your website and the computer that holds all those files has an amount of space that you are allowed to use for your website, and you pay for as much as you need. And that is website hosting. So that is another cost that's involved. And then you have other costs that you may or may not need depending on peace of mind basically. For example, Drayson Design and The Creative Tinker offer maintenance packages. So when you're running a website on WordPress, for example, which is the most popular platform to run a website on these days, you have to make sure that your software, WordPress, is being kept up to date. Otherwise, you end up with security issues and you end up with your website potentially getting hacked. So one of the maintenance packages I offer is back-ups. So that should anything happen to your website, gets hacked or whatever, we can get a back-up from a previous day or previous week, up and running very quickly so that your site gets back to where it was and as well as that, updates. So it updates the software and keeps it secure. That is an optional package that we offer, but it's highly recommended. And most people, I would say probably 70 percent of my customers, actually have that package because it is peace of mind. If you've got a website, it's no use if it's been hacked or it's not online. So it's really important to make sure you spend a little bit of money just to make sure you protect yourself.

[00:05:35.860] - Taylor
Yeah, it is, you know, if you spend all that money getting a brand new website, you don't want to lose all of that work just because, you know, you didn't have a back-up.

[00:05:44.360] - Gordon
That's right. Because if you don't have a back-up and your site gets wiped or hacked, you have to start from scratch, because that is, that's the only files you've got now, you haven't got them at all, so you have to start over.

[00:05:58.670] - Taylor
Another example of hosting that I've just thought of is email hosting.

[00:06:02.900] - Gordon
Yep. Good point.

[00:06:03.810] - Taylor
So this is, there are two types of ways you can have your emails, so you can either host them on the same server as your website, which is very common, or you can use a third party. Two very notable ones are "G Suite" and "Office 365." There are benefits to both of them. The, on the same server as your website is, it's cheaper because you don't have to pay for extra hosting space as it's normally included with your website. However, advantages of having a third party is, it means that your emails are not attached to your website. This can be good for a number of reasons; if you have downtime, for example, on your website, it means your emails will always be up and running because they're on a completely separate server.

[00:06:55.910] - Gordon
That does depend on if you're forwarding from your domain name so if there's a domain name issue, then it could still affect your emails.

[00:07:04.070] - Taylor
Yes. But on the whole, if the website were to go down, then the email.

[00:07:08.960] - Gordon
Yeah.

[00:07:10.010] - Taylor
And another reason is you have more chance of email sending, which some...

[00:07:19.190] - Gordon
Ah, now see, I have to disagree with you on that one. As long as you've got DKIM set up and you've made sure all your headers are being encrypted, then I don't think there's an issue so much there.

[00:07:32.270] - Taylor
What I was going to say was, is you have better email sending and not having to set up as much.

[00:07:38.390] - Gordon
You mean deliverability?

[00:07:39.440] - Taylor
Yes. So...

[00:07:40.370] - Gordon
Ok, making sure your emails get into somebody's inbox and not in the spam

[00:07:42.830] - Taylor
And like you said, there are DKIM you can set up, however, for the average user, if they were setting up themselves, it is a lot easier to use a mailing service like "Office 365" and "G Suite" because all of that gets done for you. You just say, "this is my domain name, these are the emails I want," and it's done for you. Whereas the way we normally do it, that requires more set up from our side.

[00:08:06.580] - Gordon
Yeah.

[00:08:07.110] - Taylor
And if you were to host yourself, for example, you'd have to set that up yourself.

[00:08:10.260] - Gordon
And in fact, if you come to either of us, that's part of our set up for your hosting. You'll get DKIM set up easily. One last additional product or service that you might want to consider is a 'malware clean up' service. Now I have one. It's not cheap because malware is a really difficult thing to manage. But what it does, is it scans your website every day and checks to see if there's any malware on it, and if there is, it will clean it for you. It will basically get rid of the malware so that your site is clean again. And if you've got a website, we were talking about this the other day, if you've got a website like Amazon, obviously we don't have a... But it's an e-commerce site, so for all the time that it's down, you are losing money, then something like a malware scanner is really quite important.

[00:09:07.920] - Taylor
Yes.

[00:09:08.580] - Gordon
Because it will make sure that your site is offline for as little time as possible.

[00:09:14.550] - Taylor
So, you know, you may think, "oh, I don't need malware protection because you've got backups." However, like you said with e-commerce or e-commerce sites, if you are dealing with orders and things, you know, you may not want or may not be able to revert back to the previous day because you may have orders.

[00:09:34.740] - Gordon
You're going to lose all of today's orders. That's right.

[00:09:37.350] - Taylor
So that's one thing to keep in mind.

[00:09:40.050] - Gordon
So there are some things that you want to consider when you are hosting a website. I have a page which will give you all the prices of my hosting and my maintenance packages. I'll put the link for that in the show notes. I think you have the same.

[00:09:55.560] - Taylor
Yep. I have the same.

[00:09:55.950] - Gordon
So we'll put The Creative Tinker links in as well so you can compare them. But you do want to be very careful who you host with. Some people will excel at hosting a WordPress website and others will only give you hosting for their particular service, for example, "Squarespace" or "Shopify."

[00:10:20.193] - Taylor
Yep.

[00:10:20.490] - Gordon
So you need to make sure you know what it is you need before you go looking. That's all I have to say on that.

[00:10:26.430] - Taylor
One last thing.

[00:10:27.900] - Gordon
Oh, one last thing.

[00:10:27.900] - Taylor
Is the hosting, is I have heard quite a few horror stories about people that have a website with someone, even that designed the website and built it, or someone that just hosts it, and they go cold turkey. So, they kind of, you can't get in touch with them, they either, they stop selling or they stop their business and, or they've even retired, and you lose access to your website if you don't have kind of login details for either your website or your hosting. However, I would like to say that if one of us were to go offline or one of, something were to happen to us, the other is there to always be there, so...

[00:11:07.590] - Gordon
And in fact, I've got a third backup as well. I have someone who has full access to all of my login details to manage customers, should both of us end up not being able to fulfil our duties. So, yeah, make sure you trust the person that you host with, or the company that you host with.

[00:11:29.460] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:11:30.060] - Gordon
Cool. So tell us about what you'd like to talk about today.

[00:11:33.780] - Taylor
So my topic for this week is managing realistic expectations. So this happens a lot in any service deliverability company, so anyone that offers a service rather than a product. And that basically is making sure your customers or clients have realistic expectations on when things are going to be delivered, how they're going to be delivered and kind of what they should expect. And this is something I have been talking with my business coach about, as recently, up until now, I never really gave my clients any really updates, I never gave them timelines, timescales or anything. And this kind of created a problem for me, not so much for the client, was that I always was, if I wasn't working, feeling guilty because I was kind of thinking, "oh, I should be doing their website," or I would kind of not, I didn't have any idea of when the projects were going to be completed. And that caused real issues because I never really knew kind of which projects to prioritise and my customers never really knew where things were until I kind of would email them saying, you know, "the website's finished." And so, you know, managing realistic expectations means that before starting a project, whatever that may be, is setting up a timeline to say these are the kind of milestones of what's going to happen, when they're going to happen, roughly, you don't have to stick to them 100%, but give them...

[00:13:09.700] - Gordon
It's good to try to stick to them though.

[00:13:10.690] - Taylor
Yes, but you know.

[00:13:11.260] - Gordon
Gives you gives you an expectation.

[00:13:12.940] - Taylor
Yeah, but things kind of can come up and things like that. But if they do, then you just let the client know.

[00:13:18.310] - Gordon
Yeah. And most people don't have a problem with that as long as they're kept informed.

[00:13:22.210] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:13:22.540] - Gordon
We've said this before. As long as customers know what's going on. All sorts of things can happen, but it's really important to just make sure that they are kept in the loop.

[00:13:32.170] - Taylor
So now my new workflow that I use, it is very easy for me to keep clients updated, because what will happen is, once we complete one of the milestones, so say that be 'on boarding,' 'design' or 'development,' I will then, you know, maybe once every one or two weeks, kind of check in with them to kind of say, "this is where we are, I estimate that this part of the website or this part of the project will be completed by this date." And most of the time I manage to stick to it. And yeah, then the client knows where we are in the project rather than kind of being, you know, just lost and not really knowing what's happening.

[00:14:11.350] - Gordon
Which is really good.

[00:14:12.340] - Taylor
Because obviously I know what's happening because I'm the one doing everything. But, you know, if you don't communicate with your client, they kind of get lost in the dark.

[00:14:20.020] - Gordon
Yeah. So a really good system to have. So, yeah, well done. Very good. I've got a couple of news items for you.

[00:14:26.880] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:14:27.760] - Gordon
So we talked about hosting before and WordPress. There is a company that is known for being really, really good at hosting WordPress websites and having amazing support, who've just recently announced that they are no longer going to be offering that support. So it's a company called "Siteground." Now, Siteground made their name by having good quality, reasonably priced WordPress hosting. And if you had an issue with your WordPress site, you could talk to support and say, "look, this plug-in is not working." Support would go above and beyond and go into your site, look at it and make suggestions for you.

[00:15:09.730] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:15:10.240] - Gordon
Well, they've just announced they're not doing that anymore. They are announcing that if you have an issue with your WordPress website from now on, you need to seek out a developer and get them to look at it for you. So that really devalues hosting with Siteground because that was their big, major reason for hosting with them. And we've had a few issues with people saying that they weren't happy with Siteground recently. So, if you are Siteground customer, then just make sure you're getting what you're paying for. And if you're not, then go seek another company out. There's two here you can check out. Come and see us, we'll see what we can do for you.

[00:15:50.290] - Taylor
Yeah, I mean, it does happen, and it's sad because, you know, people don't plan for, companies don't plan for this. However, the bigger you get, the harder it is to maintain support. And that is, nine times out of ten, the thing that fails, or is the hardest thing to do. It's not the creating the product, it's not developing the product, it's not innovating the project. It's actually supporting the product, the service, whatever it is. That is the biggest...

[00:16:19.570] - Gordon
One of the biggest costs. You're right. Biggest cost in business for I.T. is support.

[00:16:25.510] - Taylor
And the reason for it, is because you've got bigger players who are offering live chat, offering phone call support, which just isn't feasible for smaller companies. And it is a lot harder for people to do.

[00:16:36.730] - Gordon
But vice versa, the bigger you get, the harder it is to get people who know what they're talking about into support and training them up and making sure, yeah, they become more expensive and therefore you're not making a profit on it. Therefore, you cut back on your, things you're able to support to the bare minimum, and that is the problem with getting bigger. So sometimes it is worth sticking with the small people.

[00:17:01.420] - Taylor
Yeah.

[00:17:01.780] - Gordon
Because you know that when you give them a ring or you talk to them on email that, you know, they are going to know your case because they've been the people who've been dealing with it in the past.

[00:17:12.070] - Taylor
Yes. So, you get the same person normally with smaller companies. That's quite true for quite a lot of services that we buy, software services that we buy. A lot of people, a lot of software companies, smaller ones, they operate through Facebook and similar places like that.

[00:17:29.830] - Gordon
Yeah, Facebook groups.

[00:17:30.580] - Taylor
Because it's, you know, community. It means they don't, it cuts their support time down because you've got a community of people that, you know, someone asks a question...

[00:17:38.710] - Gordon
Will answer each other.

[00:17:39.190] - Taylor
Yeah. So, it means they don't have to be repetitive, answering the same questions. And you also get a better community, because people are then going out of their way trying to do different things, improving on it, extending it, which they can then share.

[00:17:54.720] - Gordon
And then reporting back and sharing, just what I was going to say. Yeah, yeah. And just one other bit of news, which I thought might be of interest to everybody, um, as of I think it was a couple of weeks ago now, but I only just noticed it. Facebook are doing auto captions on our videos. So if you're watching this on Facebook right now, there's probably an auto captioning going on at the bottom here, and some of the captioning is very funny. I think Episode 22, a couple of weeks ago is the one that I first noticed it. And it's the one where we had Marty, our dog, who decided he didn't want to stay and walked off. And I said, this is Gordon and Taylor and Marty doesn't want to be with us. And it captioned it as "Naughty" instead of Marty. It came out as "Naughty", which is not true at all, our dog is wonderful, he's a very good dog. But if you are doing live streams on Facebook, then be aware that I believe it's turned on by default. Auto captioning is happening for the people who are viewing it, and those auto captions are not always right. So we found out.

[00:19:12.980] - Taylor
Yeah, they're always improving so yeah.

[00:19:15.170] - Gordon
And they could be quite funny.

[00:19:16.850] - Taylor
Very much so.

[00:19:18.080] - Gordon
I think that's everything from me.

[00:19:19.430] - Taylor
And me as well.

[00:19:20.420] - Gordon
So thank you very much for joining us once again. If you would like to follow and like and subscribe, we can be found on YouTube and on Facebook.

[00:19:32.960] - Taylor
You can also find all of our past episodes which have the audio, video and the show notes of all the past episodes on our website, which is thisweekwith.co.uk.

[00:19:43.430] - Gordon
And of course, you can subscribe to the podcast using Apple's podcast or all of the big podcast apps we'll be in there, just search for "This Week With Taylor and Gordon." If you'd like to get in touch with us about anything we've said, please leave comments below or send us an email. And we love getting our comments. We love hearing what you think about our show. So until next week, 1pm Friday next week, we will see you then.

[00:20:15.140] - Gordon
Goodbye from me.

[00:20:16.430] - Taylor
Goodbye from me.

[00:20:17.420] - Gordon
Bye bye.

This Week's Topics

Show Notes