Skier - 1:04 am on Sep 26, 2006 (gmt 0)

Hmmm....it's been a long while since I thought about these issues. The site has been a joy to work on. It has grown from a few pages, to a size now where I doubt any one of us involved would claim to really know what all is in there.

Perhaps the biggest concern might be the cost to hire expert help from time to time as you build the site into ever more complex levels of operation.

If you just need a glorified "brochure" type site, this may not be for you. If you expect to develop an active site with various applications for the same information presented in different ways and for different purposes and the information changes regularly...them cf is worth looking at.

In this case, the client built a site initially to serve information to the visitor and wanted to be able to update every day, from their offices without need for a tekkie. Today, that same data base drives direct on-line sales, inventory control, bookeeping, customer communications, and a host of other routines. It just sort of grew naturally as the client saw office data entry activities duplicating the stuff that was going into the website and asked to have the site functions expanded to take advantage of the data stored there.

The pages (or sections) each have a wizard interface for the staff. Each of the staff have their own areas that they work on exclusively. The wizards do limit the extent to which changes can be made. However when staff needs to make more "global" changes the wizards can usually be updated quickly by the "experts". Expansion to give them control over broader parameters often leads to rapid growth in content.

No, there has been little difficulty with staff updating content. The heavily pre-formatted input wizards take care of that.

If we had started with HTML, I greatly doubt the site would have grown to "become the business" as it did. The active involvement of the client in maintaining the site every day, themselves, and spending time thinking about it, has given the site a vitality that is communicated to the visitors and keeps it in tune with the customers and the competition.