Hi all, A few thoughts from someone who recently moved from a design/developer/coordinator role into one focusing much more on content management:
From the conultant/freelancer standpoint, one thing you may want to
consider is what your typical client is like. Do you work mostly with individuals and small businesses where there will only be one or two people doing updates? If yes, you might be best using something simple, clean and lean like WordPress (even though it's a blogging platform, it can be used as a fairly effective CMS). Or are your clients typically larger organizations, non-profits etc. where there may be many more people with a hand in the site? If this is the case, you might benefit from the "beefier" CMS's (Joomla, Drupal etc.) that come with all sorts of additional tools for community interaction, and (possibly) a more robust set of user roles/workflow etc. The other thing I'd consider -- more from the designer/developer standpoint -- is to become as familiar as you can with how to customize the layout and use all of the features of the default installation. Once you've done this (maybe tried a few installations with different modifications), decide if you'll be comfortable rolling that out for your existing client(s), and also try to assess if you can manage and live with the additional overhead this will create the first few times (i.e. design/development time). Once you have a thorough understanding of how the platform works, you'll probably find you can easily implement the CMS for any variety of designs, and quite often having one or two CMS products under your belt will open up all sorts of added functionality to your sites that you couldn't easily offer before -- from the basics like updating content, to more cool features like event calendars, mini polls/surveys, slideshows/photo galleries etc. One other thing -- no matter what application you go with, give it a good, honest assessment of how easy it is for non-technical people to use. At the end of the day, it's only worth the time and effort if it's going to be used by the people who actually need it. Bottom line: go download the stuff and play! You'll never really know what works for you until you give it a try. Adrian ******************************************************************* List Guidelines: http://webstandardsgroup.org/mail/guidelines.cfm Unsubscribe: http://webstandardsgroup.org/join/unsubscribe.cfm Help: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *******************************************************************
