Stuff by Sarah

Clients Updating Their Sites

Thu, 8 May, 2008 – 5:37 pm

When I first started out creating websites for clients, the option of a client being able to update their own site wasn't an option from me. I hadn't ever looked at a bit of PHP at that point (late 1990s) and everything was done by hand or in Dreamweaver (The Professional's choice so I read!). Come forward several years, and we're in the age of clients easily updating and maintaining their sites. This is fine for certain types of sites, a shop for example, where the client browses for the photo of the product, fills in all of the boxes and hits go. It's very simple to use and it's very hard for the client to mess up (if coded in the right way). However, what about standard brochure style sites using a basic CMS or WordPress to power them. Is it such a good idea that clients can update their sites then?

My honest answer is no. Going by experience, when a client can update their own site mistakes will creep in. If you use a WYSIWYG online editor such as TinyMCE then you cannot copy and paste from Microsoft Word for example. Word adds additional formatting, unseen to the naked eye, until you paste it into the content box and save it. Kiss goodbye to that valid code. Unfortunately clients understand Word so they want to write everything in Word and cannot understand why they can't just copy and paste from there. I try to tell them that they need to paste it into Notepad first, then copy from there and paste it in, and redo their formatting within the online editor. Naturally some don't appreciate this as they're having to do work twice. MS Word has to be the biggest problem for any CMS and any developer. I've seen what Word code can do to a page, varying font sizes, extra spacing all over the place, it certainly doesn't look good, and that's before you look at the markup. Some additions can go unnoticed until you're called in to fix something and then realise you've got to redo all of the content whilst you're there. My favourite is when you remind the client of your original warning and that they've copied in from Word and they deny it. Hmmm how else did the class of MsoNormal get in there (a typical Word class) or even more strange, the good ol' <o:p> tag?

Some clients do listen though, and they only do their formatting via the online editor. Great you may think, haha think again. Clients like to make things stand out and we can do that tastefully and accessibly, but why ask the developer when they can highlight their title and make it bright red? Then highlight every heading and make it… bright red. Forget accessibility here, let's just make it multicoloured and leave the visitors to play 'find the link'. I purposely hide the underline icon on a WYSIWYG toolbar, else they'd have underlined coloured text and drive the visitors insane whilst trying to click what they think are links!

So colours and formatting are two of the downsides of allowing clients to edit their own content. Then you'll get one who knows a little about SEO, knows that words need to be on the page to be found for them in the search engines, so the next time you view your work of art for your client you'll find a large paragraph of stuffed keywords and brand names throughout it. Of course if you can see it, so can everyone else.

There are plenty more problems caused by clients updating their own sites. Maybe we've given them too much control? Not only do you lose the income from updating the site for them, you also get the blame when they break something. True, a well written contract should cover this but in the past I've not really had the guts to come out and say "Umm it's not my fault, you have to pay me to fix it". I do appreciate it's not necessarily their fault. They treat their website like a Word Document and they don't know how to think like a web developer, but so if it's not their fault, it must be ours for giving them the option to cause havoc on their own site

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