Allowing clients to update their websites

[austn1807]

I have designed and maintained my own website for years, but I have recently designed and websites for a few of my friend's businesses, and launched them online. They love my work, however, some of my clients are not very computer savvy. How do I go about allowing them to update their sites?? My main question is, how do you other web designers allow your clients to update the information on their site. Do they have to do it completely through me, (as in, email me and say, "change the "news" page to say this:") or is their a way that I can allow them to easily update their site on their own? It seems like it would be very inconvienient for them to always have to update through me, and I may not always have time to do the updates that they want on time. Im sure there is a very common solution to this, but as a web designer that is new to making a profit from it, im not sure what it is.

Also, If a client does decide that they would rather just email me and tell me what they want me to update, how should I go about charging for that? I have already charged an hourly rate for the initial design and uploading of the sites, so should I just continue to do that? I imagine it wouldn't be a great amount, as it would probably hardly take me an hour to do small updates every so often... ahhh!

Anyway webmasters/designers, I would greatly appreciate any advice or explanation of how you manage your clients!!

[attitudewins]

You can check out Macromedia's Contribute software in which you get your clients to purchase, and you can configure it to allow your clients to update certain parts of your code.

For a cheaper option, there are available scripts which you can install into your web server and customize certain portions of codes with custom tags that allows your clients to update only specified parts of the page.

For charging, you can set different rates for a small change request ( example, can be completed within 1 day ), and for a major change request in which you can give your clients a quotation before proceeding. Alternatively, you can charge per page change that can be done within a day or half day or within two hours, depending on your preference.

You can also go on a subscription scheme for clients that have changes for you all the time.

[Fixago]

I charge hourly for updates, never for site design. Updates run $50/hour. If anything, you should charge per page, but I wouldn't really do that, it's better than charging hourly (for designing a site, not for updating). I charge clients per site, and we work out a price based on the amount of pages, scripting, images, etc. involved. Most of my sites go for $7500-11,000, the higher end ones go for $17-23,000.

You can see why hourly isn't worth it. Here's why. I usually spend about 80 hours on the design. If I were to charge hourly, let's say $10 to $25, then I would be pulling in $800 to $2000 for a site. Might be good for some people, but what if I had to write content, or add PHP scripting, or integrate a database?

Another idea would be to charge in increments, like 1-5 pages is $x amount, 6-10 is $x amount, and so on.

[Alex]

You can also provide rvSiteBuilder to your clients as we do; we don't charge for this but you could add a one time fee to your clients. Some of our less-savvy clients use this.

[Eurofreelancer]

I used to have the same problem (and still do - for that matter!) my solution to the issue was to switch to using ASP.NET with a template engine and then using Macromedia to design the site & make it look good.

The site would be backed with a simple database table, and I created a drop-in admin section that would allow them to edit the database fields.

If you want, we can license you the software - it was developed as part of: http://www.imjustblank.com and it's quite simple to use.

Mind you it requires a Windows Server and MS SQL to run. Nonetheless it means I can develop a fully-fledged site in under a week and allow the user to do the content updates themselves.

This elliminates the need to charge per hour for updates.

The more clients you get the less likely you'll be able to keep up with all the updates, so switching to dynamic content is innevitable in the long run

Cheers,
Martin.

[Dion]

if the site is 100% database related, then it is quite easy to build some sort of adminpanel where the user can edit the pages of the website with some nice editor, while 'hard-scripted' code cannot be changed