Offer Contribute to Customers

[lfirth]

Hi,

I am a small time web developer that has done a few web sites. Customers now
seem to be asking more and more for the ability to edit their own content. Is
it practical to offer them the oportunity to purchase Contibute to accomplish
this? It seems that Contribute is geared more to large corporations with
intranets and an extensive web presence.

[euromig]

Yes. I think is practical to give the final user, whoever he/she is, the
possibility to update his website with MM Contribute. I did it for some small
web sites.

There are some problems. In my experience, customers would like to have all
the control over their Web but without the competence necessary to exercise a
complete control. Bringing them to use Contribute it's a good way to make them
understand that control is proportionate to competence. With Contribute they
can have some control because they have some competence. They can change only
the editable areas of the template pages, but they won't destroy their Web
Site. They can't change the blocked areas of the page, but they can publish
directly on the Web. Etcetera.

All the Contributes Guides in PDF are there for them to study. There is the
Macromedia Support Center. The forum. You can offer them a paid support
service. You can offer them to do more complex objects, like picture galleries,
build an on line data base, optimize some pages for search engines.

In short, you can switch from being a webmaster (bottleneck) to perform a
mentoring and tutoring role. I suggest that you learn to use Contribute like a
virtuoso, give to your clients a simple way to create PDF documents (installing
OpenOffice) and teach them how to use an image editor to compress the image
files.

[lfirth]

Thank you euromig for a very comprehensive answer. Does anyone know of any online resources for tutorials/suggestions in designing with Contribute in mind.

[lawrie]

Hi,
I agree almost totally with the sound advice euromig has given.
Where I would differ is that Contribute is far from a perfect solution and
every time I have used it I have kept my fingers crossed that it works on
the client's machine.
A glance at this forum and the contribue 'connection' forum will give you
some indication of the range of issues and the infrequency that a solution
is given.
Murray & Alan from the dreamweaver forum used to help here but I have not
noticed them recently.

Get the trial and give it a go.

"lfirth" <webforumsuser@macromedia.com> wrote in message
news:e1k53e$2af$1@forums.macromedia.com...
: Hi,
:
: I am a small time web developer that has done a few web sites. Customers
now
: seem to be asking more and more for the ability to edit their own content.
Is
: it practical to offer them the oportunity to purchase Contibute to
accomplish
: this? It seems that Contribute is geared more to large corporations with
: intranets and an extensive web presence.
: