How to develop wordpress websites for clients

1 Since I have bought the premium theme , duplicator will also copy that theme and will my theme still work?

Yes the theme will still work – but check the themes license because some commercial themes don’t allow reselling, or only allow it to be used on a single installation so at worst you’ll be using it against the terms of service, and at best you’ll have to pay for a new licence for every site that you use it on. This is just one of the many reasons that a lot of development places don’t use commercial themes.

2 If they get the premium theme, wont I be kinda useless to them in the future since they can now figure how to build stuff and then cutting me off resulting in me losing money?

Only if they can figure it out. But to be honest, don’t be concerned about your customers doing the work and not paying you to do it. If they can figure it out they’ll be happy with you for giving them the tools for it and you’ll get more recommendations. If they can’t figure it out they can come back to you for (billable) help. As an example, where I work we have around 10% of clients manage their own websites. The remaining 90% either don’t want to or don’t know how to and don’t want to learn, so it comes back to us.

3 Beside that option I have installed multisite on my wordpress and have a couple of sites but as of today I have yet to figure out how to map a domain to one of my site. I have tried wordpress mu domain mapping but cant get it working. I am still testing now. My host is godaddy ad so are all of my domains.

I would really suggest not using multisite for development. The reason for this is that it’s actually a lot harder to de-couple an individual site from a multisite installation than it is to “copy” it from an existing stand-along single installation. See below for more. 😉

4 Is there a better way to do this ? How do you dev or designers do ? How to build a website and then give it to a client?

There are definately better ways.

The way that we do it is pretty common for development. We have our own tsting server and domain. Each clients development site has it’s own sub-folder on our server, and they are all self-contained with their own codebases, databases, etc. When the site is approved (and paid for) we copy the sites files and database to the clients hosting server and set up the site on there. The biggest advantages to this is that we can easily transfer a sites fles, and we also retain complete control over the site until it’s all finalised.

Other people have various ways of doing things, but so far I haven’t been convinced that there’s any other better ways of doing it.

Now, for the theme, I can use a free theme so I wont use it against the TOS therefore I can copy it with the installation for the client is this right?

If you use a theme from the repository on this site then you’re covered by the GPL and you can use the theme as many times as you like on as many sites as you like. Free themes from other places may or may not be the same, you’d have to check the licence conditions with each one.

Now concerning the multisite question, for those clients that I will manage their websites for them, isnt it easier to have every clients website in one multisite?

No. Not even close.

The actual website management may be easier, but the rest isn’t. What do you do when the clients need access to the file system? Or a new email address set up? Or some custom functinality that shouldn’t be shared with the other sites in the network system? What happens when an update breaks 4 sites, but not the remaining 5 thanks to some site-specific modifications? What happens when your database server falls over? What happens when the database is corrupted and all sites are lost? (with that last one, we all know that we should have good backups in place, but not many people realyl do until the hit disaster 3 or 4 times…)

We operate with every site having it’s own hosting account. That way eveything is encapsulated, in one place per client, and can be moved anywhere any any time. Clients can also take control over what they need when they need to. It is really the only way that I’d consider doing it. Others may disagree, but to me it makes sense to keep separate clients separate.

How do you guys charge for all this.

That’s something that you’d have to ask my boss. 😉 I’m really not at liberty to discuss rates, etc. Just be aware that experience and availability are two very big factors in what charges you can level at your clients. If you don’t have much experience, and are doing this “part time” by yourself then you won’t be able ot charge much. If you’re running a company with multiple employees, office space, good support and customer service and everyone having 10+ years of professional PHP and WordPress experience, then you can charge more.

Also be aware that rates vary from country to country as well as varying dramatically inside each country. I’ve seen quotes anywhere from $10 an hour to $400 an hour, and the rates depend on the factors that I’ve mentioned above. What’s fair in one place isn’t fair in another.