Greetings,
I have been running a Web Design/Development business for several years now and it seems these days that all my clients want a CMS with their website. I have one that I provide for them and as far as CMS’s go, it functions ok and is about as easy to use as you can get. I charge an annual fee ($77 Aus) for the use which is added to their hosting costs. The problem I am having is that my clients keep asking me how to do things within it (even though I provide a userdoc). Some only use it now and again so they forget etc. Others are just too lazy to follow the userdoc. It is taking up so much of my time (so is not worth the $70 per year) and I am at odds as what to do about it. As I provide the CMS system, I feel I need to provide the support. Just wondering if any one else has this issue and what they are doing about it? Should I be charging them for support time? That seems unreasonable.
Any input would be appreciated.
Thanks
Davpat
We provide 2 or 3 short tutorials, usually during site development to get our clients involved in the content management right away. We also provide a fairly well documented manual (just a couple of pages with screenshots and examples). It seems to do the job.
Thanks for your reply.
I do the same as you but it seems to go on deaf ears. How do you feel about the CMS adding in poor coding and clients creating poor layout and content design? . Here’s an example - http://www.martianscafe.com.au/whats_on.html
This drives me crazy - I really don’t like CMS’s!!
Cheers
Well the CMS I’ve been using for a while, Drupal adds lots of divs and lots of unordered lists for navigation bits but as long as the theme is built to validate, the site will too. The doesn’t stop the client from inserting images without alt tags or anything like that but it does at least provide a valid place to start from.
One thing I’ve been doing lately is making little videos (screencasts) of CMS operations, and clients seem to be more willing to watch those than reading through docs. But ultimately, if you offer to help them for free, they won’t be motivated to find things out for themselves. Perhaps you should offer a certain amount of help per month or year, after which you charge for your time. (My hosting company offers 1 hour of free support per month, after which I would have to pay, which I think is fair enough. It sharpens the mind!)
Regarding the mess that clients create, some CMSes allow you to nail down what the client has access to, so that they can basically only enter plain text that you have already formatted with tags in the HTML. You can also force them to insert alt tags etc. It’s more work, but more satisfying for both parties.
Unless your working in house I would recommend charging support. Also, add an additional service to train s an up-sell. I mean… there is no reason why you shouldn’t be getting fairly compensated imo. Though, this entire thing could probably be avoided if you built something from scratch that completely aligns with the given business work flow. However, that would require a significant budget. So the clients need to understand that the trade off with the generic cms is that there will be a learning curve. They are free to learn it on their own, have training by you and/or when they come to issues call you for support a fair hourly rate. That is what I would recommend. I don’t know what cms your using but someone mentioned Drupal, and that has a gigantic learning curve for end users because the work flow is very much programming centric, not business oriented to a specific task. Which is both an advantage and disadvantage.