Webmaster woes

Jay,

We fill you pain.

One suggestion. Get wampserver for your pc. It will take care of your not having local PHP problem.

Gene

I mainly use Joomla for all of my client's sites - and that's only after I endured a steep learning curve. Most of my clients are extremely non-techy people who still think IE6 is the greatest browser.

I set them up as Administrators in the admin area so that while they can change all the text that they want, they can't mess with any of the coding.

I don't use flash for any of the websites for exactly the reasons you described - I use plugins and modules that imitate flash animation and the clients are able to add their own pictures and text themselves.

I always back up at least once a month.

You should have a cheap Linux server next to your PC. Then you can test anything at all before you put it on the live site.

Performance is not an issue. It can be pretty much any old piece of junk. It doesn't even need a terminal or keyboard.

It is simple. If a client wants constant updates... you need to charge for your time. You could have a design update grace period to offer initial revisions to the client. Then after a set period deem the design finalized. If they want it updated after that, then you can charge them a monthly retainer fee or per hour based on the type of work being done. You could charge more for action scripting and less for updates on a WP blog.

Dennis

Great questions!

A lot of my clients buy our Drupal-services. I definitely recommend Drupal, although I'm fully aware of its drawbacks and the steep learning curve.

What we do is that we build a nice and easy-to-use backend for the clients "admin" which is a very very limited version of the real site admin. Basically hiding everything except the bare minimum that the client needs to update the site content.

The initial configuration took some weeks of tweeking, but now we've got it set up so we can clone it or do a multisite setup, allowing us to add a new client web site in 10 minutes. So, we can focus on additional functionality and making the theme stand out.

I've used Wordpress a lot, it's really a great platform although I don't use it for clients sites anymore. They tend to be willing to pay more for Drupal-sites than they do for WP-sites, just my experience.

Clients do have problems learning either one of them, clients always have problems... or they wouldn't be clients, right? :p When they have problems learning, we sell our seminars and support.

You could install Drupal/Joomla/WP on a virtual machine running Linux, then you don't need an additional physical server... and if you mess things up you can just reboot and do a clean install.

In terms of revision hell, I find it's best to be as up front as possible about my web development process. If my client requests too much (like flash intro or video editing), I just tell them I'm not qualified. They can't really do anything because I'm basically the "guru" to them, even though I'm pretty much a novice in my own eyes.