Customer edits

How do you handle

[Blelisa]

HI Guys,
I was wondering how you guys handle customer edits for clients who are not local to you. Here is what I am dealing with. I have my first customer that is about 1000 miles from my location, I have completed the first draft of his site, however the text needs to be revised. Normally I would sit down with the client and hash everything out with the site in front of us. But here I am not sure what is the best way to do this. A conference call is not possible because the client says he is too busy. He has printed out all pages of the site and is writing revisions on it. He asked if there was some way I could email the pages to him and just let him make the changes himself. I told him no, because he does not have access to a WYSIWYG and does not know HTML (besides I did no want to lose out on maintenance revenue). Is there someway to get the pages to him so he could make changes on his computer instead of writing it long hand?

[benevolent001]

What type of changes he is making?
any changes in design or contnet it depends on this factor a lot
or some changes in navigation

Since your client dont have any time to chat online or through conf. its better to allow him to make changes on paper if those are just small changes in navigation stuff..or design and send them through email.

[johntabita]

The easiest way for the customer is for you to copy and paste all of his text into a Word doc and let him make the changes. But then you'll have to reformat all of the text when you copy it back into the HTML pages.

Personally, I prefer that the client manually marks up the pages and faxes the changes back to me. Of course, I'm assuming here that he's not rewritting whole blocks of text, just making minor edits.

[JohnKelly]

How about a CMS of some sort? As a designer you should be focusing on new projects, not making minor page edits for clients. Also a client would not want to pay you to change a sentence or two.

Take a look at www.flyspeck.net

I've used this on a few sites, and it works great. I'm not related to the company that puts this out, just a satisfied customer.

I always though it redundant for a client to mark up a Word doc or send a fax, and then for me to in effect duplicate the changes in HTML. Having a CMS saves me time and clients $$$. Plus, I get to work on more exciting stuff :)

[zooloo]

Never used it but Macromedia's Contribute allows restricted editing of webpages.

And you need Dreamweaver to set it up... although if you find Macromedia's mark-up you could hand write it.

zoo

[beckie]

Most of my clients send me their content in a Word document or in an email.

Before they send me their content, I make it very clear in my contract that all content must be final. If they have any edits, it will be an additional amount. Too many clients won't revise the content and will want to make 20 million edits to it once it's live.