One of our main aims is to improve your workflow, making sure that daily you don’t waste time on unnecessary clicks. You can focus on what really matters. Managing clients is a big part of any WordPress maintenance business, and often the logistics behind the management take more time than the actual making/maintaining of websites.
We have already introduced little ways to help you manage clients, let client tags and client reports do the heavy lifting, while you can quickly and efficiently maneuver your clients. However, we haven’t stopped there, now you have a whole screen dedicated just to your clients.
What is the Client Screen?
Think of your client screen as your client notebook, that’s where you go to be able to have a clear overview of all of your clients. We noticed how much you like having a websites overview screen, a place where you can search all of your websites, so we made the same for your clients.
Client Photo and Notes
Now you can see all of them in one place. Each client will have a photo – Orion will automatically search their gravatar if there isn’t one you can manually add a photo of your client. You can also add a client photo by copying the photo URL. At a glance you can recognize your clients and access their websites.
Alongside the photo, each client will have their contact details, and a notes sections. In this section you can write notes about the actions you need to perform for your clients. It’s easy to loose track of what needs doing when, this way you can write yourself little reminders. This can be anything from “send client report” to “new client, send contract”, it’s up to you entirely. You can be creative here.
View Client Websites
Each client will have two buttons by their client box, one is for websites. Here you will be able to see how many websites that client has, and by clicking on the view websites button it will take you to that client’s websites. This makes it now even easier to access all of your client’s websites.
Create Client Reports
Next to the “View websites” button, we thought it logical that with one click you can create a client report. All of the client’s websites are automatically grouped and incorporated into one client report. By clicking the button you will be taken to the client report page where like normal you can continue to pick and choose what you want to include in your client report.
My Watch Says It’s Break Time …
With the new additions break time should come quicker than before, saving you hours of tedious client management a year. Now you can spend that time doing something you enjoy or perhaps landing yourself some more clients!
Ian
This is looking really great! However, I’d really like to be able to upload a photo of the client (or logo for that matter) instead of only allowing or link inputs. I thought that’s what it was going to be, but I’ve never found an upload button, just the link textbox. Will we get the option for uploading a photo?
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Ian,
To be honest, we haven’t given upload a lot of thought, since you can simply use a picture (or logo) that’s already on the Internet.
We might circle back to this at some point, but right now we’re focusing on making new add-ons and preparing our API for public release (stay tuned!).
Ian
Yea, I can understand that. However, most of my clients’ photos I was going to use for this would be on Facebook and I cannot for the life of me figure out how to get the link for the photo. Any thoughts here?
Nemanja Aleksic
You could simply rehost their profile pictures with Imgur. There’s a Chrome extension that will help you do this quickly.
http://www.ghacks.net/2013/05/09/upload-pictures-to-imgur-regularly-chromes-imgur-extension-may-help-you-with-that/
Ian
Right on, thanks for that link – pretty useful extension. I’ll just host the images on my server. Thanks
satori83
Having a custom button would be nice too, granted it would take you to a 3rd party but lets say I keep all my client notes and info in Evernotes, or Google Keep/Docs, Basecamp, etc. The button could allow the user to put a quick link to wherever they may need to jump and see something. I thought of it after using this custom Chrome page and its become like my morning launchpad: http://satori-design.d.pr/1fxVs
Nemanja Aleksic
Makes sense, back in ye olden days we had a favourites list in the sidebar, people used it to add things like cPanel links. I’ve bumped the suggestion to our Product team, thanks!
Miklas Kroager
I came across this blog post by accident, but WOW! This system is all we’ve ever wished for – thank you! Gonna send this over to my wp guy right away.
Nevena Tomovic
Thank you Miklas 🙂 Glad you found us!
Pandit
Dashboard is simply Awesome 🙂
neil lopez
The product is amazing, I’d spend days if not the entire week updating all our wordpress sites, now I can do it in just a single click.
Adam
This looks awesome, definitely on the verge of moving over to ManageWP!
Andrea Gatley
Are we going to get automated client reports? Pretty please?
Nevena Tomovic
You will 🙂 Automated performance checks, security checks and client reports are next on our to do list. I can’t give you an ETA at the moment, but I can promise you it’s on the list and something we are looking to do sooner rather than later.
Regards,
Nevena
david.bolthouse
Rather than just one note per client, I’d need multiple notes so we can assign duties to different programmers and have a history of what was requested and completed. Only then would this be of much use to me. As it is, you might as well add this info to the domain section and not have a different client section. There is far too much fluff in this Orion interface — we need things more concise so we don’t have to scroll down screens filled your upsell material to see the info we need.
Nevena Tomovic
Hey David,
You can add as many notes as you like. My article was just an example of a few, but you have the freedom to write as much as you like in your note section.
I am sorry you find it fluff, we were trying to logically organize things. This is just the beginning of the client’s screen, with time there will be additions and upgrades so hopefully with time you will come to find it more useful.
Syrehn
Love the new client screen but I’d have to agree it would be great to add a client note that had a timestamp or even supported markdown in case we had to bold something.
Side Note: It would be amazing if we could move the per website “Notes” section to the top so that it’s right in our face instead of at the bottom where it could get missed if someone doesn’t realize there could be critical notes down farther on the page. I originally thought that the cross arrows on those sections (i.e. updates, backups, optimization) meant we could drag/drop them around but nope. 🙁
Nevena Tomovic
Hey Syrehn,
Thanks for your feedback. I have taken your suggestions to our dev team! This is just the start of our managing client’s customization, we will work on making it more flexible.
Thanks for all of your help.
Regards,
Nevena
info
Amazing. Well done.
Im still waiting for the option of assigning a custom thumbnail to websites though. My websites are so hard to discern from each other. Would be amazing if i could just assign a logo to the website which would appear on the thumbnail also. Then i would just add the clients logo!
Nevena Tomovic
Hey there,
thanks for your comment, that’s a great idea. I will certainly pass it on to our dev team and see what we can do 🙂
natebald
wouldn’t it be nice to have the option for the clients logo somewhere, then be able to use that directly on the client reports for them? It drives me nuts when I run client reports and have to keep uploading logos. Maybe I am just doing wrong, have tried templates but my template changes each month.
Nevena Tomovic
Hey Nate,
That is a great idea indeed, do you mean to have a logo directly uploaded to your client and so when you go to make the report it carries over automatically?
Syrehn
Yes! This would be an amazing addition. 🙂
natebald
Thats what I mean…
Nemanja Aleksic
Hi Nate,
Thanks for your input, I’ve let our Product team know about it. I can’t give you an ETA, but there will definitely be flow improvements that will make everyone’s lives easier when working with tags and clients.