Website content management software for clients
wedgin (267 points) | Tue, 2006-06-20 14:38I've had this question come up numerous times recently when talking to people about websites. They seem to always ask about once the website is up whether they can edit information on the site on their own without myself having to do it. This question seems to always catch me flatfooted and I don't really have a good answer for this.
Does anyone have any suggestions for software that would enable clients to easily edit their website with little to no knowledge of html, be it a standalone app or serverside app. In the past I've setup blogger installations for people to update news on their page and this worked well. Is there something as simple that can be used to edit information site-wide? I came across
this wikipedia entry about the topic, but don't know were to start as there are so many different options. This would be for very small scale use(website of 3-15 pages), so I don't want to go overboard and would like it to be preferrably free. Any recommendations?
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Takes a bit to get used to the system, but once you figure it out it's pretty easy. Works well for small and big websites.
Contributes a great app ( not serverside ) . Its super easy to setup and manage different user roles. E.g, You can be the admin and edit everything, you can define Client name #1 to be, I dunno, lets say... A copy writer. You can set up the roles in Contribute to only let copy writers edit text. Also, you can set it so that the copy writer cannot create their own stylesheets and also forced to only edit certain areas (which you'll define with dreamweaver templates if you wish!).
Only downside, its not free. Check out Contribute anyway, you can then charge your client that bit more for setting up the editing side of things. I personally wouldnt want to give the client tooo much control over the site: A) Because it scares them off B) They can and probably will (without realising) wreck the site design c) Makes them think it was actually easy to build the site and could question future invoices now they "can do it all themselves" .. ( thats something ive heard a few times).
If you're looking for a free, serverside solution, I too would recommend Joomla, Drupal or Wordpress. Joomla is more of a content management system than Drupal or WP is but at the moment, if you care about your code and you want CSS layouts you've got some work cut out for you to make Joomla decent for you. Joomla's output code is a bit sloppy and dated. Wordpress has some unbelievably cool plugins and a much larger userbase. Drupal is pretty neat but ive not worked with it for a while.
My recommendation? Contribute all the way for clients !
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If a client goes "I can do it myself now" on you, just say "ok that's cool dude". They'll be back in 2 weeks after really having f...ucked the site up. Then you can just reset it from your backups. (Btw it's worth it to backup client's stuff.)
A)
The thing is, clients wont always realise they messed things up. They'll say " it broke, why did it break? What did you do? " They then just want to be told what needs to be done and they think it can be done themselves. Which is why I try not to give too much control. which is why I like contribute. It saves my clients money, allows them appreciate the site more and the hard work that went into it and saves me time having to fix/reset the site.
B)
I backup clients work every 2 or 3 weeks if they are updating the site themselves. Or instantly backup after doing updates myself (HD and DVDr). I then use Backup 3, 2 times a week for my own folders.
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