"i only speak liquid" #44: Being clear with your clients

Hey all 👋!

Welcome back! This is my 4th and final edit of i_only_speak_liquid - thanks for having me in your inbox for the past couple of months! I’m Joe, a Storetasker expert and front-end developer who has worked within Shopify’s Plus Support team, agencies, and as a freelancer for a good few years. For the final time, let’s go!

What I’ve been thinking about:

I’ve been putting some thought into how you can make your work stand out as a freelance developer in the Shopify space. Plenty of people offer similar services to you, often at a lower price, so what can you do to ensure the clients you want choose to work with you? One thing I’ve found throughout my career working in agencies and with large enterprise clients, is that clear information is invaluable to them. 

This can be something as large as putting together a rigorous functional specification for the client’s new store or theme, or it can be as tiny as including info elements within your schema for settings to let the client know what something does when they’re playing around with their lovely new site.

This may sound silly, but something as small as this can help you stand out from a freelancer working for a small fee who is happy to cut corners and get the task out of the door. Whilst the work they produce may work in the present, their code and setup may be too confusing to change in the future, or the client just may entirely misunderstand what a setting or field is used for within their theme due to poor communication.

Just by adding some explainer text into your merchant’s theme editor, you’re keeping yourself in conversation with them long into the future as they continue to adapt your work as their business needs change, and this keeps at the front of their mind. 

They may add a section to their homepage and see the incredibly handy “This setting does X” or “Enter Y here to do Z” text in the customiser. They remember how great you were to work with, and they’re more inclined to reach out to you again in the future as they’re reminded of the great experience and the way you thought about them holistically, and not just another task on a to-do list.

3 links you can’t miss:

Top Front-End Tools of 2023 - it’s good to know what everyone else is up to, and Smashing Magazine keep on top of things with their yearly roundup of the most popular tools shared via their newsletter over 2023

Where have all the websites gone? - a look at the loss of the “website”, everything is just apps now, and it’s a loss felt for this guy who grew up obsessed with websites (hence my current career and the fact you’re reading this newsletter!)

Theme blocks - now available in developer preview, repeatable “theme blocks” will likely become a big part of your workflow when they go into production, so get ahead now by taking a look over Shopify’s blog post and documentation on them to see how you can make the most out of this, in my opinion, very handy new featur

1 app I like:

GA: Age Verification - a great, customisable option for your clients who may need to lock down their site for selling alcohol or other, even more exciting things 👀

One learning as a freelancer:

One thing about relying on yourself for work is that you should always expect clients to do the unexpected. They may hit you up for a project, spend time scoping with you, and then decide against it entirely, or you may find out they’ve been shopping around for other quotes, thanks for your time, no hard feelings etc but you’re just that little too pricy for them right now! 

This all comes with part of being a freelancer and learning not to take any knockbacks too harshly and as a personal affront to your business is hard, but it’s a key part of being successful. There’s no use in throwing more wasted time into something by worrying about it or agonising over how much thought you put into a project that didn’t work out. Take a breath, and move on to the next one.

That’s all from me on IOSL, you can stay in touch with me via LinkedIn, thanks a lot for having me! 

Cheers,

Joe