Macromedia Contribute for site maintanance, comments?

[mscir]

I'm making a small personal business site that the owner wants to
maintain himself. He doesn't know html but he's a bright guy and he did
just buy a book on it. He asked me what I thought of some sort of tool
to enable him to modify his own site, that didn't require a good
understanding of html or css (until later, if he makes it that far). He
mentioned Contribute, which I never heard of before. I watched this
promo which looked pretty good:

http://www.macromedia.com/software/contribute/productinfo/features/brz_tour/

but I wanted to see if anyone here had any recommendations, besides
suggesting he hire it out. He's a one man show and is doing everything
himself to start his company from the ground floor... money's tight so
he wants to keep expenses down and update the site himself it at all
possible.

The site will be for an individual, mostly to show his education,
experience, qualifactions, publications etc. It will be less than 2
dozen pages, no frames, but it does use CSS with half a dozen DIVs per page.

Thanks,
Mike

 

[WebcastMaker]

I'm making a small personal business site that the owner wants to
maintain himself....

The site will be for an individual, mostly to show his education,
experience, qualifactions, publications etc...

Which is it? Personal or small business. The answer could be different
based on what the site is used for.

In either case, his best bet is to hire someone. If he has a problem
with that, remind him that this web site is going to be used to drive
business. So how much is it worth?

Second, if you build a site for him, that he wants to update. Build the
entire thing with server scripting. Read the content from a database,
then give him a few ages that allow him to update the information in the
database. He has to learn no html that way.

 

[Big Bill]

I'm making a small personal business site that the owner wants to
maintain himself. He doesn't know html but he's a bright guy and he did
just buy a book on it. He asked me what I thought of some sort of tool
to enable him to modify his own site, that didn't require a good
understanding of html or css (until later, if he makes it that far). He
mentioned Contribute, which I never heard of before. I watched this
promo which looked pretty good:

http://www.macromedia.com/software/contribute/productinfo/features/brz_tour/

but I wanted to see if anyone here had any recommendations, besides
suggesting he hire it out. He's a one man show and is doing everything
himself to start his company from the ground floor... money's tight so
he wants to keep expenses down and update the site himself it at all
possible.

The site will be for an individual, mostly to show his education,
experience, qualifactions, publications etc. It will be less than 2
dozen pages, no frames, but it does use CSS with half a dozen DIVs per page.

Thanks,
Mike

He could use the Amaya browser as an editing tool. In edit mode he
could alter text no problemo.

BB

 

[Spartanicus]

Kindly snip quotes to the minimum required.

He could use the Amaya browser as an editing tool. In edit mode he
could alter text no problemo.

Amaya cannot cope with most real world code, it's hopelessly deficient.

 

[Toby Inkster]

I'm making a small personal business site that the owner wants to
maintain himself.

One thing I've done for a CMS recently is allow the author to input
content in their choice of format from plain text (which the CMS processes
to add paragraphs and does precious little else), BB codes (which are
parsed and then paragraph breaks are added) and full HTML.

Your business owner could start off posting content in plain text and then
progress.

 

[mscir]

Thanks for the replies everyone.

 

[Jeffrey Silverman]

I'm making a small personal business site that the owner wants to
maintain himself. He doesn't know html but he's a bright guy and he did
just buy a book on it. He asked me what I thought of some sort of tool
to enable him to modify his own site, that didn't require a good
understanding of html or css (until later, if he makes it that far). He
mentioned Contribute, which I never heard of before. I watched this
promo which looked pretty good:

What does "making" mean from your perspective? Creating HTML templates for
layout and look/design? Creating a server-side CMS? Both of those thigns?
Or something else entirely?

Also, how "small" is this guy's business? I think, from my limited
knowledge of contribute, that properly configured, MM Dreamweaver can do
what you want without the extra setup hassle of Contribute. DW has
templating and site maintennance tools built in, but is kind of designed
like MS Windows -- as a single user system. MM Contribute, AFAIK, is
designed to be multi-user but is also more complicated to set up
and may be more expensive because of that.

I can't believe I'm recommending DW, because I personally will never use
it. But it does have the tools for the job, in this situation, from what
I can understand of the situation.

Ooops! I just took a look at MM's website (not mms.com) and it looks like
Contribute might be the right tool, not DW.

An even better bet, IMO, is finding a cheap PHP-enabled host and
installing a free CMS. Check out http://opensourcecms.com for more info.
The free CMSes range in features from frills-free to enterprise-grade and
range in quality from alpha-pre production buggy crap to enterprise grade
mature production code.

But there are so many to choose from, you're sure to find one that is
useful.

later...