Ask HN: Designing a website to be edited by a non-coder? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Designing a website to be edited by a non-coder?

3 pointssaumilj5 comments

What are some suggestions for designing a modern-looking website that where content can easily be developed and deployed by someone without a coding background? The current admin has a heavily text- and table-based website with a navigation frame on the left side (it was designed in the late 1990s). He currently uses a legacy version of Adobe GoLive to make new pages and write up content. His content is basically just text, tables, graphs and weblinks. He also has a blog that is maintained at a separate address, which would be nice to add to his main domain (the blog is hosted on blogspot).

What are some suggestions? The goal here is for him to be able to easily write his content without having to learn a programming language or a difficult software package. I was thinking about maybe just making a CSS that makes the website appear a little more modern based on his common way of aligning pages, but should I consider a web framework like Django or a CMS like Drupal? Are there ways of intuitively editing content with these systems?

Sorry if the question seems inane. I appreciate your support!

To start, I'd ask the current admin if he is willing to learn something new. If he wants to keep the admin side the same as always, your choices are going to be limited. In that case, I'd suggest doing a CSS only edit...

If he is interested in learning something new, you have some options.

Most of the work I do is in and around the marketing sector. Consequently, I am often in the same place you are - I need non technical people to be able to edit content. When I evaluate solutions, I always focus on two main areas. My solution has to be extremely easy to use and when it fails, it has to fail safe.

Under this criteria, Wordpress has always risen to the top. Not only is the admin interface elegant and easy to use, but it would be hard for a user to screw up so badly that he/she kills off the entire site.

I think you're on the right track with modifying the CSS to modernize the current layout. I have used CMSs (Joomla! in particular) for non-tech clients in the past, and it was always too much for the client to handle just for creating and posting new content. They ended up relying on me or some other developer resource for updates in the end. The one exception might be WordPress, but even that might be too much for the non-techie client. I would recommend creating a basic, homegrown CMS using a framework like Django, or ASP.Net Web Forms that gives your customer exactly what they need and nothing more. The up-front cost to the client is probably more than going with a traditional CMS, but likely to be cheaper in the long-run in terms of support.

In my experience, Wordpress + a training session + a handful of 'common tasks' videos has always worked well for clients. Joomla is a fun CMS to play with, but the admin interface/verbiage is far too complex for the majority.

I've been pretty happy with Dokuwiki with a CMS template (DokuCMS). Used Dokuwiki in internal and external (with DokuCMS) sites. The editing is text based but not hard at all to grasp (I tell staff just copy the text from an already made page to use as the new page.

The DokuCMS template is pretty well laid out so it can be modified to suit. Also the DokuCMS navigation menu is just another wiki page, so s/he can edit that via the wiki editor as well so adding sections/pages are no problem.

http://www.dokuwiki.org/dokuwiki

http://www.dokuwiki.org/template:dokucms

I think a couple of other comments here have the right perspective (multiple, so I'm not commenting as a child to any particular one).

First, assess where the intended user(s) is at and what they can and will realistically do, and not do.

As a favor to a relative, I once revised a business's static site to use a CMS. Pretty simple stuff. But it turned out that the business partners, while claiming they wanted to be able to edit/update the site themselves, simply refused to look at the prototype and the pretty clear documentation I'd written up -- screen shots and all.

They said they wanted to be able to update the site themselves. What they apparently really wanted was to be able to tell someone to update the site and have it happen quickly.

Well... that's what you pay a web developer or assistant for, on an ongoing basis.

They weren't so into the paying part (aside from my relative -- also, I wasn't particularly looking for a standing content-maintenance gig).

Assess where your customer is at. Make sure you're really on the same page, and that they are willing to take the required initiative.

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