Forum Moderators: coopster
Also, the client wants to ensure that the customer cannot take his site to another webhost (meaning the template). In other words, they can take their content but not the template.
The client wants this (or another idea) to prevent losing hosting customers since that is where he makes his money (not in the design).
The first time the site is built, I or someone, will assemble all the content, images, etc. Thereafter, is there a way to let the customer make changes w/out having access to the site files and code? The idea of a CMS came to mind but I've never used one and it seems over-kill for this situation.
Personally, I think the easiest way to handle the problem is to simply state all changes or updates to the site must be performed by "us". If a person does not know HTML /CSS they might screw things up once inside the code anyway.
Any thoughts?
Personally, I think the easiest way to handle the problem is to simply state all changes or updates to the site must be performed by "us". If a person does not know HTML/CSS they might screw things up once inside the code anyway.
I do somthing like this myself. Then if they no longer want to use my services, to kindly inform me. Then they can do whatever. If they screw up their site, it's no longer my problem and I take them out of my portfolio.
The way to keep your customers is to provide reliable service for a good price. I don't like the idea of trapping people into your (your client's) hosting service. I think it's kinda low to not allow somone to take their site, design and all, elsewhere if they choose. They paid for it after all.
I agree with you on the point about locking them into the hosting service. Particularly since the hosting plans are not cheap (or should I say "competitive").
Being quite new to the web design world, pricing is always a puzzle to me. Since I would be getting the design work for this service, does anyone have suggestions on how to price template-based sites?
My thought was $500 flat fee for up to 8 pages of content and images - to be supplied by client. Free changes/updates for 1 month. I'll add more stipulations to the agreement
Thereafter, is there a way to let the customer make changes w/out having access to the site files and code?
I've taken a site and done a lot of work that goes beyond the basic html knowledge of my client (the boss). I'm thinking that with a little more work this site will be much more dynamic, so I need to provide a means for the pages to me maintained, without my intervention. I suppose I'm building a custom CMS for this site. The desired result is to allow product changes, additions, deletion to any page on the site, from an interface to the database.
I have a programming background, so it's not really difficult to create the CMS, more than anything I'm feeling my way thru the process and learning as I go. But for the amount of work involved, (which doesn't seem to be so much) I'd say that it's not over-kill to create a basic site admin panel, particularly if you are using the same template for all the sites. Build it once and distribute to each client with their new site.
At least one shortcoming to my approach: new pages can't be created on the fly. I have to actually create a template if one doesn't exist. But for those things that I have implemented, the ease of site maintenance just got moved up a few notches, not only from the client POV, but also from the perspective that I no longer have to edit the html or php documents freeing up my time to learn more about running a web site.
