Help with preparing wordpress for clients

[meelosh]

I need some advice or direction with regards to getting wordpress ready for clients and to ultimately leave them on their own. Maybe some of you can share with me or point me in the right direction with regards to the following
1. How do you handle updates once you have given the site over to the client....do you have that site email you personally to make the updates or do you let the client make new updates
2. What measures do you take to prepare the admin area so the client does not have access to areas where they could "break" what you have done

[varun21]

1. Yes, future maintenance is their responsibility. Or we can do that for an hourly charge.
2. I remove all non-essential menus from the wordpress admin panel and they can only see the ones relevant to them. They do have access to those areas, just that they cannot see the menus.

[meelosh]

thanks for that varun21....do you give them full admin role or not? How do you do #2?

[varun21]

I do give them full admin. But during the development I develop an understanding on how tech savvy the client is. And accordingly I may create a second userid for them and let them know that admin is only for admin purposes.

For no 2 there are various plugins or you can edit the functions.php to hide the menus.

[shorntyy]

I think you shouldn`t forget to install the all in one seo pluqin!

[varun21]

Beyond the two questions you have asked, I set them up with W3 Total Cache and a backup plugin with monthly/weekly backups. I use premium frameworks with built in SEO so don't need a thirdparty plugin for SEO. But you still have to take care of things like sitemap generation/ submission etc.

[Dether]

If You finish a website for the client you dont need to worry about it anymore, of course if both of dont specify other thinks in agreement. Show Your client what he can do and what he shouldnt. You can make a special agreement about updates - You can get some extra money for that :)

[meelosh]

thanks for all the tips and advice....i too use a premier framework so do not worry about SEO plugins. It would be interesting to see a list of what everyone's goto plugins are as there are just so many out there it is hard to know what is good or not without a few initial hickups