Website Designs that Clients Will Love to Edit Themselves

Clients change their minds – All the time! How frustrating is it to spend two weeks on a project for a client and a week later to be asked to add a form or a slide-show to your original design?
Clients don’t want to be annoying you to make small changes either. They would rather make them themselves, but they cannot handle code, which was why they employed you in the first place.
You might think that using a website-builder is a compromise too far, but if you offer user-editable website design as an option when you quote for a job, you might be surprised at how many clients jump at it.

Website Builder Pros and Cons

Client Usability

Sub-Domain

Client Interface

Hosting

The Hosting market is undergoing an evolution. Dynamic as it is, most website builders use proprietary software that they insist on hosting on their own sites. This means that your clients will not be able to move hosts without rebuilding their websites from scratch.

Website Builders to Consider

Webydo

Webydo is a new website design software aimed at professional web designers. With Webydo, web designers can build stunning websites from pre-designed responsive templates built and designed by other professional web designers as a base for their clients.

Being that Webydo is a B2B solution for web designers, you can potentially manage dozens or hundreds of clients within your dashboard.

Client usability is very high with the simplest interface out there that has a very easy learning curve and the websites are hosted on a reliable cloud infrastructure.

Screenshot source

 

Weebly

Weebly has been around for a long time. The company has a wide user-base with designers because of the features it offers.

WiX

WiX is a popular website builder because it is seen as low-cost and simple. Customers tend to stay with the company for years, so they must be reasonably satisfied.

Screenshot source

The drag and drop interface is simple for clients to use and you will get few complaints.

Own-domain price plans range from $4 – $25 per month, though the $4 plan displays WiX ads and the $8 plan is very limited. The lowest price plan you should consider for your clients is the $18.40 (Unlimited) one. There is an extensive App Market where you can find add-ons such as email marketing and live-chat applications at an extra cost.

There is no white-label dashboard, so this program is less than ideal for a designer. Sites are hosted on WiX’s cloud servers and there is no possibility of exporting a site and moving it to another hosting provider.

Conclusion

If you are happy to compromise on your design tools then there are options that will allow you to build a great-looking site where your client will be able to make changes in the months and years to come.

The biggest drawback with all of these programs is the inability to move the site to a different web-hosting service. If the client does decide to move then a new website will be needed. That said though, most businesses redesign their sites every few years in any case, so this need not be a deal-breaker.

Your Input

How important is it that clients be able to make minor edits without sending you an email? Is providing this ability important enough to compromise the software you use to design the site? Please share your thinking using the comment box below.

Contributor Bio:

Daniel is a freelance writer who happens to be an internet marketing, web development and web design aficionado. When he’s not writing he probably researches the latest trends in the web design and development scene to keep up to date for his various projects. 

Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/DanielKatzW or visit his site: https://danielkatzwrites.com/