Do it Yourself Web Maintenance

Lots of folks want to have a website they can get up and running and just get in there and edit stuff themselves very easily… And it is possible… But there is always a learning curve with anything related to computers... Even playing a new game has a learning curve…

Lots of times folks want me to design a site for them and then want me to just hand it over to them to just add and delete stuff to at any given moment… They ask:

How do I just log into the site and change a picture or something?

Here are some options for doing this:

• Learn HTML… Edit your pages with notepad or another text editor and then upload the pages using FTP
• WYSIWYG software – Get FrontPage or Dreamweaver or another editor, tweak the pages and them upload them via FTP
• Use a Content Management System (CMS) to handle all of your sites functions.
• Use a web based WYSIWYG editor or site builder tools…

Here are some things about the above methods:

• HTML is great... If you learn that you can become a designer just like me...
• WYSIWYG editors all have steep learning curves to work to their full potential... And FrontPage can be a nightmare of bizarre code and having a very messy file structure on a server…
• CMS’s also have learning curves and are basically “pre designed” and are often hard to “skin” to your liking... They can also be buggy and have to be updated because of evil hackers out there that are always roaming the web causing havoc
• Web based tools are very limited in what they can do. They also write dirty code and can be quite buggy as well...

I have looked high and low for an easy way to enable people to edit their own sites... It just aint that easy... (Sorry)

Conclusion:

I have had lots of folks take some of my designs and get in there and totally hack it up to where it doesn’t look like my design anymore… To folks that have done this is fine but if I am hosting your site and you do this I am no longer able to have you on my portfolio and will be asking you to find a new host after the first of the year… Just thought I’d blogg about this while I had it on my mind…