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I want to be able to offer my clients a no brainer, super simple WYSIWYG website.
I have tried searching around, but only find CMS similar to Joomla which is very complex for someone who never managed a website before. I want my clients to have something extremly simple.
Any ideas on what would be a good CMS?
Thanks!
Anyway, there are lots of themes that you can find that make WP less bloggy looking and more CMS looking and it's pretty simple and has basic WYSIWYG.
Or are you looking to go even simpler?
[webmasterworld.com...]
Or are you looking to go even simpler?
Wordpress style would be great, as long as it wasn't in a Blog format. Any ideas?
There are lots of great resources out there - themes, ebooks, howtos, etc - that can help you, but since many are commercial I don't want to recommend anything. BTW when I say "commercial" don't interpret that as "expensive". I think even if you go the commercial route you could get everything you need for uder $100.
CMS made simple is the system. just do a google search for that name and you will find it.
It's open source so its free.
take a look.
Once again, I'd rather do word press but this other isn't too bad. Better then joomla when looking for simplicity
Have you thought of Adobe Contribute? If you are not dealing with thousands of pages and there;s no call for forums and so on, it may be worth checking out.
One of the people who I mentioned who was lost with WP is a savvy programmer type with all kinds of computer knowledge, but he's never really seen HTML, CSS or PHP and was just utterly confused (of course, he wanted to know how it worked, which complicates things).
Before you go and build something, you could take an hour and show them a few default CMS installs - WP, CMS Made Simple - and then show them Contribute and see which one is most appealing.
Contribute is not really a CMS, which is one reason I love it so much. You design pages how you want, not according to the limitations of a CMS. For the client, it is really a simple way to edit web pages via a 'browser'. It is that transparent that some of my clients forget that they are in IE sometimes and are looking for the edit button. ;)
From a management point of view, you can specific different access levels for different users and it deals with real files and directories, not dynamic content.
A CMS that could simulate that, would be awesome. But I find that nearly all CMSs thrive on hurling in hundreds of 'features' that may be brilliant from a geek's point of view, but confusing and uncustomisable for the average user (or even advanced webmaster). CMSs seem to thrive on, 'modules', 'plugins' and all manner of complications. And good luck moving content to a new CMS if the one you chose stops being developed, or someone has customised it.
Of course, a CMS does have its place. Certainly in very large content websites, or where the client really does need access to dynamically generated and integrated content, membership and so on. But they do need constant maintenance and checking for security updates and so on.
</your milage may vary>
