Project goal

The main goal of the project was to create a website, that would professionally represent Adam Placr as a well established and well-versed finance credit specialist. It was also supposed to attract new clients in a decent and a non-obtrusive way, thus it was to be SEO optimized and some of the quasi-landing pages had to be designed in a way to get clients’ attention and make them consider contacting Adam.

Design

The website is fully responsive, taking into account the ever-growing use of mobile devices. The website was built on WordPress and more specifically, it was built using The7 theme – the theme also includes extra plugins like WPBakery Page Builder or Slider Revolution, which are super useful in such projects. The website features a lot of references, business partners and personal certificates, which clearly show the specialist’s experience as well as his trustworthiness.

Lessons learned

This project, unlike Tepasse Consult – read here about the catastrophe, was really fun to make and the whole process of creating the website went amazingly well. The client gave me his requirements for the website and showed similar websites that could serve as an inspiration. I put everything together, presented Adam with design mockups, we changed a few things and agreed on a final version, which I delivered soon after. We tweaked like two or three things on it, optimized the web and the project was done.

Yeah, the website is quite simple and I understand, that there’s seemingly nothing to screw up (or maybe, there is…? Again, if you haven’t, check the Tepasse Consult project). But what I learned here was one thing – value. I understood how much ROI can such a “trivial” website bring and me getting a taste of it was very important. Let me explain.

By design, I underpriced myself on this project, even though I knew how to justify my rates. There were multiple reasons for this – first and foremost, we have been friends with Adam for many years and the website wasn’t a “biggie” for me – I love designing and developing and I loved to see how much value it brought to him. This is called giving without expecting anything in return, a.k.a. “not fronting” – if you are interested in these ideas, you can read some stuff on this from Gary Vaynerchuck. Secondly, I just wanted to have this feeling of knowing, that I can price myself higher because I can really bring so much on the table. Next up, I just wanted to expand my portfolio, have this experience and then look back one day after many years and see, how much I will have progressed since that project. Lastly, I wanted to make sure that if I truly love doing this kind of work, then money is not the number one reason for me doing it. And as I learned, it’s not.