How Do I Make Content Editing Easy For My Clients?

Every WYSIWYG editor has its own advantages and disadvantages

As a web designer, in your daily workflow, you often face the never-ending content revisions requests from your clients. Usually those changes are limited to some point but wouldn't it be easier if they can just do it themselves? It will save you and them precious time and also will keep you focused on current projects. In this article we will review some of the best practices used in Web design for content editing, even for people that have no idea of HTML but yet very powerful and simple to use.

Conclusion

The Online Page Editor Add-on is a real competitor to dominating products like Adobe Dreamweaver, Adobe Contribute or the use of a CMS. The Page Editor Add-on puts your users in control of their website empowering them to edit live pages without the use of any extended CMS database.

Adobe Contribute will cost you $199, but that is just one license per person. Your clients need to buy a license as well and that is the big difference compared to the Online Page Editor Add-on. The Page editor costs $35 without having to buy any licenses for your clients. With the Adobe Business Catalyst again, you'll need expensive licenses (Adobe's Dreamweaver, Business Catalyst and InContext Editing) and it won't let you create your own templates from scratch, which will never let you create the perfect website with editing independency for your clients.

Advantages and Disadvantages

Adobe Contribute

Advantages

User-friendly editing with preview in browser, spell-checking and drag&drop from MS Word and Excel.

Check-in / check-out and versioning (with rollback) (albeit on file system level).

Basic workflow to publish content in easy steps.

A central administration module.

Disadvantages

Your will only be able to edit a website on a machine that has Contribute installed.

A web designer will still be required to build the initial website.

Updating website content through Contribute may be slow.

Coding must be done in Adobe Dreamweaver or another web design program.

Templates created using Adobe Dreamweaver can be used in contribute as well.

Adobe Contribute CS5 is only available in English, French, German and Spanish.

Adobe Business Catalyst
+ InContext Editing

Advantages

It is a hosted online business building tool.

Easy to skim the page, activate and ready to edit.

No need to know HTML or Web editing.

Disadvantages

Expensive Adobe licenses needed for designer and client

The website looks is depends on the program.

Content Management System (CMS)

Advantages

A universal layout is created.

Simplicity in design of the admin UI.

CMSs provide the facility to control how content is published, when and by who.

Disadvantages

A CMS is too complex for a non-expert just editing website content.

Cost of implementation. Certain CMSs may require hardware installations.

Maintaining CMSs may require license updates, upgrades, and hardware.

Volume of files may be large in HTML-based systems.

Larger CMSs can experience latency.

Advanced HTML Editor 3

+ Online Page Editor Add-on

Advantages

It eliminates the need for multiple programs to change simple errors such as changing spelling on a webpage.

Several users can update a website simultaneously.

Administrators can ensure the style, code and integrity of a website is preserved while allowing users to update the site content.

Very well prices compared to the other WYSIWYG editors (source: OutSourceHouse).

Rob Nijkamp

Rob Nijkamp Hi, I am Rob and proudly introduce myself as the Marketing manager of Dynamic Zones International BV.

That means that I am responsible for all sort of things like professional news articles, world leading premium content, the outraging Dreamweaver extensions & web components and helpful tutorials for the DMXzone community.

It's a honor to have the opportunity to participate and bring the DMXzone community to a whole new and stronger level with more high quality and superb DMXzone content for our loyal members.

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