New Macromedia web update system

Easy updates - advantage or liability?

[stever]

News is filtering out from various conferences about the upcoming MM product which will allow webmasters to open up areas for customers to supply content.

Any thoughts on this? Empowering the client could also lead to that carefully crafted content being replaced with, um, non-marketing-friendly text. As the awareness of the concept grows, are we going to have more debates about where and what they can change? And is it going to lead to a more knowledgeable customer core who are happy to, or even insist on, tweaking their own content?

[tigger]

That’s nice of MM to finally offer something to us that we can make money from, just think of all those phone calls from clients "I made some changes to my site now it won't work :)". Oh well I'll sort it next week, invoice them :)

[korkus2000]

I use content management systems on most of my sites and I have found customers either never change it and wait for a new update where I will include it, or someone learns it well and does a pretty good job.

[Chris_R]

I am so poor at doing anytype of dynamic stuff - something that allwed people to change stuff would be nice.

There is one table on one site I work on that only needs like 10 words changed on it, but it is a pain to do it everytime - when the customer could - and rather would - do it.

Hopefully they will make it easy for us non programmers.

[rogerd]

As websites grow in size and require input from more departments and more people, having end user groups manage much of their own content is increasingly important. I think the days of the web firm being a content bottleneck are becoming history.

The technical challenge for SEO-types is to create content management systems that let users add or change content but still produce easily indexed results. Naturally, some content might be off-limits to end-users (like the page you spent five hours tweaking). Overall, though, letting users add and change content can be a major plus. On one site I work with, I've empowered users to add pages within a well-controlled structure - some of these pages actually end up performing very well in non-ultra-competitive searches. I'm not sure how the DW feature works, but overall we need to embrace the users as content managers.