Technokinetics.com

Web sites should be easy to maintain. 

For clients who don’t want to become web programmers, there are two approaches to managing web sites over time.

The first involves a web developer maintaining the site, with the client paying either a monthly maintenance fee or a charge every time the site needs to be changed. This can be costly (the charges add up) and inefficient (there’s a time lag between the client writing the content and the developer publishing it), so I generally recommend the second approach: using a content management system (CMS).

With a CMS, a web site can be edited through a simple, user-friendly administration panel. This means that anyone comfortable using a word processor can become a webmaster with only a very little training (usually just a couple of hours). Adding new content or editing existing content involves little more than logging into the site, typing text into a box, and clicking “Publish”.

Websites using a CMS are a little more complex to set up, but the benefits over time are substantial.

My CMS of choice is WordPress. WordPress is a free, highly customisable CMS, used by tens of thousands of sites (if not more). It is more user-friendly for clients than alternatives, and supported by a large and active community of volunteer developers.

To run a web site using WordPress you will need a hosting package that supports PHP (a programming language) and MySQL (a database management system), which many but not all hosting packages do. If you would like to have your site set up to use WordPress and need to upgrade your hosting account to do so, however, then this need not be a significant expense. Suitable hosting packages are widely available at competitive rates, and I can provide hosting directly to clients who need it.