Hands on: Simple content management

In my last column, I explained the basics of uploading your website, and some of the problems new users can run up against.

It prompted a email from reader David Spathaky, who said: "…it reminded me of my constant request as a web designer, also a request of many of my clients, which is to be able to update content simply on their sites."

David continued: "Blogging solutions have been approaching this vigorously. Apart from FTP, you can update content from server-based text editors accessed through a web browser via a ‘back-end’ webpage."

He suggests that another method is via a Firefox browser ‘plug-in’ that provides drag-and-drop editing in the client desktop Browser window. "When the blog entry has been “assembled” in the editing window, a button press sends the content including HTML mark-up, text and image files seamlessly to the server."

David’s quite right, of course; designing and uploading the website in the first place is a pretty big job, but often it can be even trickier to make sure it’s kept up to date.

Even my own site suffers from that, as other projects invariably take precedence. If you’re putting together a site for someone else – unless you deliberately want them to have to come back to you and pay for each update – you should consider the ease of updating.

Ideally you also need to make sure it’s hard for them to change things that can’t be changed.

How you do this really depends on what you have at hand. There’s no doubt that some enterprise tools, such as Microsoft’s Sharepoint, are designed to make this sort of task extremely easy, but as long-term readers will know, in the PCW Web development column we tend to prefer open-source or cross-platform solutions.