[Avenir]

Hey, me again.

So I'm working on the webpage for the office here, creating it with dreamweaver and a touch of hand-coding. In a few weeks, the page should be done, online, and I'll be back at school. Office staff (with less web knowledge) will be updating the page. They mentioned wanting a simple, swift way for them to keep the page updated (news, text editing), but no major redesigns (I'd say one or two updates a month). To me, the simplest would be to have them just keep it maintained in Dreamweaver. I don't think the learning curve is that bad, and for what they'd be doing, it would just have to work like a word processor. But, amd I missing something, and is there any simple other way to keep the page updated? I don't know a lot about Macromedia's Collaborate, but I've heard interesting things. And, as always, cost is a factor as well. Thanks in advance.

[thePurpleGiant]

If you know php, the best way to do it (IMHO) would be to create a php page with all your elements, yet have the main content grabbed from a text file or database. Then create an 'admin area' whereby the staff can edit the content, but not the rest of the page.

[Macola]

If you need a WYSIWYG solution, then give Contribute 2 a try. There is a major security issue in the way it handles its XML information file (try searching here or on the Macromedia forums) but you can work around it. I use it currently for a few clients who want to update their own websites.

[philzilla]

i'm voting for what thePurpleGiant said. you could even look into using WordPress, or something similar. it's free; Contribute isn't.

[Avenir]

Thanks for all the replies, on both posts. The upper management decided, after all that with the flat images and stuff, that because I'll only be here for another couple of weeks, that they're just going to hire an outside firm locally to do the website. I hope upon hope that the designers realize, as we all did, that flat images are not a good way to do it. However, the firm here is obsessed it seems with "cool awesome" flashy intro stuff, and I bet they press the designers to build the whole site out of flash. Seeing as no one here knows anything at all about Flash, that should make updating and editing virtually impossble. Oh well, to be honest, I'm not going to be here, I might be back at Christmas to see (and/or clean up) the aftermath of whatever comes about with all this. I'm hoping I'm wrong on all acounts and I'll coem back in December to a great site, but we'll see. Besides, I have to pretend to be an Architect at some point, not a web designer.

Thanks again all for the replies, I'll post more as it happens.

(PS - Phil - she is insane, and she will drag this site down.. You can't force the content to fit into her site, you have to build the site to accomodate the content. She doesn't understand that.)