Want to Create Website that Someone Else Can Edit

I am a freelance web designer and am all self taught. I learn a lot as my clients demand things, but this one has me caught up.

I have a mother of a pageant girl who is looking for a website that I could design and would allow HER to login and do all of the following (promoting her daughter):

- post to a blog (adding pictures to the blog is a plus, but not neccesity)
- upload photos to one or multiple albums on the site (she would need the pictures to automatically resize to save storage space on my server)
- change the background by season (i.e. holiday, talent, education, etc. - I would create templates for her and she could change them as needed - CSS?)
- a place where she could upload videos from events (viewing could be through windows media or anything - would just need the video to be a clickable link - not neccesarily viewable in the site)
- A way to send an email to a list of people who have entered their email into the site (not register, but just submit like to recieve a newsletter) with upcoming events, updates, etc.


She basically wants a myspace page (kind of) without having to be on myspace. Make sense? And I obviously don't want things to be branded - I want her to think I'm genius. But really it's you guys that are genius I hope! Any help - even if you can only help on one item - is MUCH MUCH MUCH appreciated!

If this type of stuff is not readily available via the web (script or whatever that I could copy and try to manipulate) - can you help me with the job? I'd be happy to receive quotes and work with others who are interested!
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She would be able to do all that if she learned HTML, FTP and how to use templates but who is going to teach her all that? Is she willing to pay for your time?

She needs to choose what changes she wants as time goes on and then pay you to make them.

I don't see any other way.

What about some type of CMS? i've been doing a little research, but can't really determine if that would be cost effective and easy for me to set up for her.

I've been recommending it a lot lately, but Wordpress could cope with everything you've asked for.


OK, it is essentially a glorified blogging engine, just don't set the blog itself as the homepage and it becomes a "feature" instead of the focus of the site.

can be done. Gallery2 - either this could be embedded on a page, or you could use a prewritten plugin. These tend to vary in quality in my experience, but G2 is a popular app so there should be plenty of support.


Just have different themes all copied from the same base. That way client can select themselves, you just have to provide them.


Well if you just want to upload videos to be downloaded, any host can do that.
For embedding videos, I've had my eye on (but never used) FlowPlayer.


This is a trifling matter. Any CMS will be able to accommodate such functionality, or you could build your own.
As for the sending of email, the solution varies depending on how many users you need to send to, but you shouldn't have any real worries here. (If it's less than say, 100, you could do it through your desktop mail client even...)

What languages do you know? Much of the above assumes you're familiar with PHP. There are likely equivalent solutions for other languages.

Sadly I only know HTML.... thanks for this - I'll check all this out!

So why did you take this job?

I didn't take it yet... I'm hoping i'll be able to provide what they're looking for or find someone I can third party it to.

If you're going to try to subcontract it, the price would be too high for everyone to make something. However, if you could find some wiz kid who would be satisfied with $100, then it's doable. I did that once when I had to set up a server with AD and I had no AD experience.

Yes i agree ... try using wordpress or joomla ... opensource ... kepps cost down.

Shouldn't be too difficult, as in, this shouldn't require much PHP. The only thing is building the theme, you'll need to understand how to fit components together - this is something else I intend to look into in more detail the future.

As for subcontracting (as it's called), the trouble is that this project is so small that your cut wouldn't be worth your time really. (Not that I know what your time is worth:wink:)

That's why I suggested finding a $100 wiz kid instead of subcontracting.

You Could base the website on RSS and incorporate it that way, its a good thing for optimising the site as well. It's built for editing news etc and can quite easily be incorporated into a templated design and can add pictures.

I have used it on my site as a link to the news feed http://www.crearecommunications.co.uk

Go to this website to purchase http://wordpress.org/

Hi,

I'm not sure what your budget is or what software you are using but it may be worth you investing in Adobe Dreamweaver and Adobe Contribute.

http://www.adobe.com/products/contribute/ view the features section to find out more on what it does.

A one line PHP script could fix your template issues if you'd prefer to have them change automatically based on the date...

parrothead517 I'm not sure if you are still around Ozzu, but I have been playing around with WordPress as a full site solution. It offers a lot in terms of the customer being able to control content after you set up the site, it's also a lot more than just a blog. Uploading images, video, audio and other media is a piece of cake. You can create pages and have them be the landing pages as well as a myriad of add-ons.

The forum and help files are pretty comprehensive so far I have been able to answer all my questions through the search function and have had them all covered.

I would suggest having a good look at WordPress to anyone looking for a cost effective (it's free!) solution to creating a website that needs to do a lot and be easy for the customer to use, you can also create your own templates, download free templates and a lot of sites now make paid templates too if you are looking for something different.

http://wordpress.org/