Fixing it quietly would be faster for me, but it guarantees you have to ask again. So I send the walkthrough with the fix.
You have ten minutes between clients and a link in your menu is pointing at the wrong page. You email me. I fix it in four seconds, write back “done,” and we both get on with the day.
That worked, but it also made certain that the next time a menu link goes wrong, you email me again.
So most of the time I send back two pieces: the fix, and a walkthrough of how I did it. The walkthrough takes me longer than the fix did. It’s the half that’s worth something to you.
A hundred closed requests later.
Nobody sets out to build a dependency. It happens because fixing something quietly is the fastest way to close the request, and a hundred closed requests later the only person who knows how the site works is me. That’s a bad outcome for you, and it’s a boring one for me.
What I mean by a walkthrough.
It’s a click-by-click guide with real screenshots of your site, captured while I do the work. I record these in Scribe. Every step shows the screen you’ll be looking at and says what to click, so you can skim it, jump to step six, and stop reading the moment you’re done.
The standard WordPress pieces are already recorded (adding a user, replacing an image in the media library, updating a menu, publishing a page), so you’re not paying me to make those again. What gets recorded fresh is the part that’s specific to your site: your post types, your forms, the way your homepage is put together.
It lives on your site, not in a document you’ll never open.
The walkthroughs go on a private page on your own site, behind your login, grouped by topic. That matters more than it sounds like it should. Documentation parked in a shared Google Doc is documentation you have to remember exists, find, and open in a second tab while you’re already stuck and already annoyed. When it sits one click away inside the admin you’re standing in, you use it.
Most of it is fear, not difficulty.
The reason people don’t touch their own site usually isn’t that the work is hard. It’s that they’re afraid of breaking something in public, on a Tuesday, with no idea how to put it back.
So the first walkthrough is never a task. It’s the safety net: where the undo is, where WordPress keeps revisions of a page, what autosave has already saved for you, and how the backup works. Once you know you can put it back, editing a page stops being a risk and starts being a five-minute job.
Doesn’t that put me out of work?
I get this question from other developers, never from clients.
It does not, because the work I want isn’t the four-second work. Nobody should have to pay an hourly rate to update a popup. I’d rather spend those hours on the migration, on the accessibility pass, on the WooCommerce problem with three moving parts.
And if you want me to keep doing all of it, I will. Some people choose that on purpose, because their time is worth more somewhere else, and there’s nothing wrong with the choice. It costs more than learning it once. That should be a decision you make with the price in front of you, not the place you end up because nobody showed you the other option.
I want to be the person you call because you want to, not the person you’re stuck with.
When you get stuck, the walkthrough is what’s wrong.
If you follow one of these and it doesn’t match your screen, tell me. A step is missing, or a plugin update moved a button, or I recorded it in developer language instead of yours. That’s a gap in the documentation, not a failure on your part. I fix the walkthrough, so you don’t hit it again and neither does whoever comes after you.
What I’m not handing over.
Some of it stays mine, and I’d rather say so than let you find out on a bad day. Anything touching the theme code, the database, DNS, or the checkout is my work. There’s a real line between running your site and running all of it, and pretending the line isn’t there is how people end up afraid of the whole admin.
What it sounds like from the other side.
Two clients have described this back to me better than I can.
She happily fixes issues and will even send you a video to explain how it was fixed, in case you’d like to know.
Amanda, Office Manager
She takes the time to explain things to me, helping me to understand and learn as well.
Margaret, Marketing & Events Manager
Neither of them is describing a feature. They’re describing not being stuck.
If you’re working with someone now and you have no idea how to do the routine work on your own site, that’s worth asking about before you get the next invoice. And if you want the walkthroughs to exist for a site you already have, I can also do that for you, without rebuilding anything.
Let me know if you want a hand with it.