I’ve been asked by customers over a number of years to be able to edit their web site so they can update it once I’ve completed the initial work.
I’ve looked at many solutions including the customers purchasing the same software, Adobe Incontext Editing (which worked well… until they pulled it as a free service – Adobe rant is another day). Next up was Surreal CMS, but i’m not convinced by it and it would often corrupt the pages when I downloaded them to adjust the template. They’ve recently launched V4 so we’ll see if that improves things for the few customers I have running it.
My current solution, and the best so far is to use WordPress. I looked at WordPress a number of years ago when I was evaluating blog tools but decided to use Google Blogger as this seemed to give a competitive edge in the Google organic rankings as it was their own product. Since then, WordPress has become a full CMS web site design, build and maintain product and is now my preferred route of launching a new web site (bypassing Dreamweaver).
One of the reasons it is so good is the number of plug ins available – if you want to do something for the web site like RSS all the pages then there is a plug in for that. Another great reason is that of course customers have the confidence that they have complete control over their web site and can update small parts of it (and large parts of course!).
My experience of letting customers update their sites usually results in one of three things
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- They update their site brilliantly and throw themselves into it and drive it to new levels with their industry knowledge and combine with new web skills
- Nothing happens
- A few things happen, but, for example, images are uploaded as they were taken from by the camera – I went on one of my former customers the other day looking for some village information and a photo which was 160px x 140px or something like that was over 600kb – wondered why the page with 15 photos took a while to load.
At the risk of sounding slightly arrogant, it does take a bit of knowledge to do web design correctly. Formatting text, writing content in a certain way, organising the structure of the site and content and amending images to fit the page accordingly are some of the key elements which take some knowledge and practice.
Saying all that, I will probably not be using Dreamweaver again for the forseeable future and just rolling out WordPress web sites so my customers can choose how much or little they wish to do on their web site – and email me if they get into trouble! This is why a new page has appeared on my Chalfont Web Design web site about WordPress – the first new page in years (do as I say not as I do)!
I am so lucky in that my job continually challenges me to learn new things, evolves constantly, enables me to meet new people all the time and find out what they do / need – it makes me look forward to getting up in the morning* 🙂
*Not that I do get up particularly easily in the morning…