In the last few weeks I got a few phone calls from people who had their sites build using some content management system (open source or secret source!) and they were asking me if they could gain access to the back-end of their own site and update some of the content. After some poking around and asking some questions we learned that their web designers are not providing their clients the administrative access and still continuing to charge for every little website update which could easily be done by the clients themselves.
Hey guys … that’s not a fair to your clients!
And to the smart website owners: if any web designer is doing that to you, I think you should honestly give them the boot and seek professional service somewhere else!
Traditionally web design companies would build a website for a client and then generate a residual income for themselves every time that they updated the website for the client using clunky primitive tools such as Dreamweaver or Adobe Golive.
Content Management Systems (CMS) arrived to change that. The idea of using CMS web application is so a website owners can update their site from anywhere online. So a website update that could take few days to happen, now could be done in less than 30 minutes or so.
In the year 2008 even a small family business can easily afford having a content management powered website thanks to great projects such as Joomla, Drupal, or WordPress. In fact many of those applications are often more advanced than many bloated solutions that larger companies use to power their websites. So my advice to you: if you want a website, make sure you ask for a content management too, and makes sure that you get access to the administration back-end so you can take control of your website yourself.
If some web design and advertisement companies see the change of technology to their disadvantage, maybe it’s time for them to update their skill set. There are still so many great opportunities for them to stay profitable such as providing Information Design, Template Design, and Training services.