SurfScranton On The Web: Content Updates

SurfScranton
On The Web

Putting It All Together

Content Updates

You can guess from the way I talked about interesting and changing content that I won’t suggest you just put your site up and forget about it. Customers won’t come see the same stuff twice, so you have to keep it fresh to keep them coming back.

"Wait!" you say. "If we pay a fortune for first class design the first time around, are we going to pay the same high hourly or page rate for every change?" It could happen, but negotiate to avoid it.

Constructing new pages in the same style as an existing page should be relatively cheap. If you can prepare copy in Microsoft Word, your designer can simply cut and paste into new pages in no time at all.

Of course new graphics and photo manipulation will probably be at the old, high rate. And if every page has to be innovative and different, the full price will probably apply.

Online Updates

You can have a site that you update yourself. Say you run a used car lot and you’d like to keep an up-to-date list of the most desirable cars in stock. With healthy turnover, even the most reasonable rate for updates would kill you. The solution is a site that gets its content from a database, with special pages where you can enter your own information.

In some businesses you might even let the customer create content. E-Bay is almost 100% user created, and Amazon lets customers enter book reviews. Free classified ads would be a good small-scale candidate.

This takes genuine computer programming (finally, something I’m good at!) and costs more up front, but you may be able to pump out fresh content every day without paying another cent.

Independence!

You can also gradually gain the skills to do HTML web updates. If you are comfortable with Microsoft Word, you can learn to make new pages with FrontPage in a very short time. If you think this is a possibility, make sure your hosting service and design consultants set things up to allow it from the start. And be prepared for your consultants to charge double to fix anything you break!

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