1y ago

Helping those who come after me maintain a website.

Hello fellow programmers!

I have a website I am creating for a non-profit with multiple locations, and I want to know the best approach to take. The styling will be the same for all them, but the actual content should change depending on the location. I want to create the website in a way that is easy for someone who is not technical to update, even if it's only text, images, and links. Any thoughts would be helpful.

I would like to avoid libraries or frameworks, as I want a simple ftp server to reduce costs and complexity for everyone involved.

10 comments

There's a case to be made, realistically speaking, that using a well-known framework or even a CMS like Wordpress means less complexity specific to your website to understand for the next person. FTP cough SFTP or Markdown/HTML is definitely not beyond non-technical people to understand and use, but sadly there could be some resistance nowadays I imagine.
I would look into static website generators. Sadly I'm not sure what is most reliable nowadays, but I would prioritize easy of use and installation, as speed is probably meaningless on your scale. Here's a random article.
- Sounds good, I'll look into it, and thank you for the article.

Document document document.
Also, the nice thing about libraries, frameworks, and CMSs is that they already have documentation. If it seems like a pain to learn one of those, imagine how much worse it would be for someone to learn custom code that doesn’t have any resources on Google.
- Thanks for your response! I'll do my best, however the issue is I don't necessarily want someone to look over documentation just to edit a date on a webpage. I do understand what you mean though.

maybe a static site generator and set up some CMS?
- Problem is teaching non techies how to use that static site generator. Start talking about html or git and the eyes will glaze over. Definitely not sustainable.

Have you worked with WordPress before? You could create a theme for the sites to maintain consistency, while letting the client have CMS access to edit the content.
- That'll probably be the best way to go, thank you.

Unless this is a full blown web application, going with a service like squarespace or WordPress is the way to go. Then the only "dev" work is styling and maybe 1-2 integrations with other services. This puts the power into the admins' hands.

10 comments