I’ve recently been reminded of a truth in web development that I experience with numerous clients. Just because something can be done fairly easily, doesn’t mean it will get done or with any regularity.
With the proliferation of content management systems like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal and a slew of others, the ability for clients to manage their own website updates or content management is really right at their fingertips.
When I first started doing web development I started with Frontpage (GASP!), then I moved fairly quickly up to Macromedia Dreamweaver. I’m still using Dreamweaver 8 as my core HTML tool of choice, but I’ve also expanded my development into ASP.NET sites using Microsoft’s Visual Web Developer Express.
When I first designed websites for clients, many of them would rarely think about updating their site on a regular basis so I would just encourage them to email me when they had an update they needed and I’d take care of it for them since it required FTP access and knowing some basic HTML to get things looking the way they wanted.
With the advent of CMS’s like I mentioned above and my transition into using them more as development platforms, it became easier for me to guide my clients into being able to login and update their own content as they needed. I would let them know that if they could send an email through a web client like Yahoo or Hotmail, they could edit their own pages for their site. Did it happen regularly? No. Did I still get emails and phone calls to update content for them? Yes.
You see, then as now, content was always the hang-up. It wasn’t really how easy it was to update it or not, it was that people wouldn’t create it themselves and content creation was always a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, low priority.
Along with providing the ability for content to be updated easily by individuals on your team, you also need to motivate and encourage them to always be thinking about content and updating it on your website.
Now, if you’ll excuse me I need to delete a few events off an “Events” page that happened back in 2009. Apparently nothing new has been going on there recently.
