I am making a website for someone - how do I make it easy for them to maintain themselves?

Question

If a site is going to be updated frequently (adding items for sale, etc), isn't there a way to create a form someone can fill out (with basic info like price, description, etc) and it will automatically format/style/align everything so they don't even have to deal with dreamweaver or anything? Then they can upload the updated product? I am making a website for someone who has basically no web-building skills, but needs to be able to maintain the site for a small local business.

they will be using paypal... and i don't know php... isn't there some way to adapt style sheets so they can just fill out a form for new content?

Answer 1

Yeah ... what you are talking here is dynamic website which is database driven .

In order to make a site where the admin (client) can maintain the site of its own then you need to make admin control panel for the site where you can provide pages to add / delete / modify etc options . Changes made in admin section can also make front end changes in your site .

For this you need
1. One scripting language like ASP , PHP, ASP.NET , JSP etc
2. One RDBMS like Access, MS SQL , Mysql , Oracle depending upon the OS and database size.

The only other solution for this is to make a Desktop application which will generate ready to publish web pages. Admin ( client) can upload this pages via any FTP softwares.

Have a nice time

Regards
Suraj jain

Answer 2

I saw a lot of the answers about installing open source this or learning database that. But it all requires some level of involvement and understanding.

If you want to keep it simple I would look no further than http://shopify.com/.

The templates might not give you alllllll the flexibility you need but the designs are clean and simple and if you want to roll up the sleeves you can make the design whatever you want using their architecture.

They simply take a shaving off of your profits so if you are making money they make money and if you do not make any money you are not out the cost of building the site. So it is a win win. It has the PayPal hooks in it already and all the admin features you are looking for. To have somebody design and code a site like this for you could costs 10's of thousands (or a lot of a friends time) and these guys serve it up for free and just shave some off the top in return.

Hope this helps

Cheers,
HueyTheG

Answer 3

There are several good approaches to this problem. My current favorite is to set up the business with portal software, and design the look-and-feel by customizing cascading style sheets (CSS's) that are easily or automatically applied to new content. Portals have the added advantage of multi-level security privilege, so the organization can delegate authoring and maintenance of various modules/sections/pages to different individuals. Also, sophisticated functionality can be purchased as discrete modules, and added and maintained easily.

Take a look at the free DotNetNuke portal. It has some pretty nifty and comprehensive free modules, and tons of reasonably priced commercial modules from various sources, with snowcovered.com offering a virtual "shopping mall" of portal modules. I'm looking forward to the forthcoming, "DotNetNuke for Dummies" book, which may even save you writing a lot of procedures and documentation for your customer.

Answer 4

If they want to sell products. I prefer go to php with mysql hosting service. And some more you add in the shopping cart which free and easy to setup. You can use www.oscommerce.com. I am using this for my website www.sipstech.net/catalog/ which is more reliable and u can wash ur hands after setting up to them.

Answer 5

if you want a simple, cheaply and easily designing web using html it is microsoft frontpage it is a software comes with officexp so goahead and teach them how to design and maintain

Answer 6

teach them basic html commands
by a free software