Do you know of a service to update a website without knowing HTML?

[Doug Wilkins]

Does anyone know of a free or really inexpensive service that allows users to join a website, create a template based profile page and allows them to make changes to it without knowing HTML. I have a website and am trying to simplify the registration and maintenance of the site. The page that is created by the user will need to be viewable by the public but only changed by the member.

The website is http://www.littledaycare.com/.

Thanks,
Doug

[Ian Arkin]

You are looking for something called a "content management system," or CMS. There are several available for free online, including Joomla and Drupal. These, however, can be quite complicated and will probably give you more features than you need.

I checked out your site and, depending on your budget, hiring a freelance web developer to make a customized solution would probably be the way to go.

Alternatively, if you are tech savvy there are great tutorials available on the internet for building a simple user management system with profile editing. It would involve creating a MySQL database with a users table and a profiles table, coding a registration script, coding a login script, coding a form only accessible to people logged in, and then having your providers page show content from the database.

[Doug Wilkins]

Thank you for responding to my post. I am currently updating and adding members by hand. It is ok for now, but if the site grows I will not be able to continue to do that. I will look into Joomla and Drupal.

Unfortunately, I am currently not making any money on the website, so I do not have a budget to hire a freelancer. I plan to add Google adwords to the site to try and make some money. If I do, then I could afford to hire some help. I am currently creating the website using Apple's iWeb. It is an easy way to create the site. But, it does have its limitations.

As far as creating a MySQL database that is out of my range of abilities at this time. If I do decided to hire a freelance web developer, how do I go about finding one? Do you do that type of thing?

Thank you for your help,

Doug
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www.littledaycare.com
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[Tom Marsh]

Doug,

It sounds like you need a CMS alright, but I think Ian is right on target that Drupal or Joomla might be more than you need. A robust, healthy middle-ground would be WordPress.

There are more themes than you can count... Including some really basic ones if that's all you want, but you can also design one from scratch to mimic your current web-site. Since you're adding users manually and doing manual updates, I'm guessing you're at least a little comfortable, and as such would really encourage you to look at WordPress for your needs. A lot of LAMP hosting-providers can install this as part of your hosting package (its automagic on mine--one click and done) so you'd just need to upload your template and bring in your content.

Certainly, there is some learning curve, but power and features of the free CMS packages that are out there are extremely compelling--your administration time is pretty likely to be drastically less once you learn how to use the new tool. To that end, there are lots of books to teach folks how to use WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Check out their features, download them, and try them out. You can use a tool like XAMPP if you don't have a test server to work with--this will give you a working, integrated Apache/Mysql/php/perl stack on your PC/laptop that you can use to try them out locally.

I'm preparing to transition my web-site to WordPress--Initially I thought I would have to use two CMS to get the blogging and content features I wanted on my site but I think WP will suit me for both applications--certainly, its a lot better than what I have (b2evolution, which is okay if you're just doing a blog only) and really isn't that hard to learn (or setup.)

Get with me offline if you want help with setting up a CMS--it takes some commitment of time (or consulting money,) but you can get you need and get your administration time under control--freeing you to build the rest of your business.

[Tom Marsh]

After looking over your site I want to suggest you look at WP even more closely--setting it up to do a "mutli-blog" site is easy. Think of each user as a "blogger" whose content will be restricted to the name, general location of their daycare, and experience/resume` information.

This way you have a self-publishing platform where providers can register, publish their ads, all with far-less intervention by you. You might be able to achieve this out-of-box, but if not you might need to have somebody expand the code-base of WP to work the way you want it to--check out the publishing workflow process... This might work pretty handily to keep your site from falling victim to spam-posting taking over your site.

[Amy Latka]

You might also consider building a Ning site (ning is the platform which SmallerIndiana.com is built on). Simply go to www.ning.com and you can build a very usable content management site for free -- no programming skills necessary. It will allow members, discussion forums, etc., just like here. :)

It will also allow you to customize somewhat without having HTML knowledge. However, you can also hire a designer to completely customize the site for you.

Good luck!
-Amy

[Joh Padgett]

If you want to have the benefits of Wordpress and the ability to allow multiple blog users on the same site, let me suggest Wordpress MU (MultiUser). The folks at FireDogLake have been using WPMU for a while now and allows them to run several different high traffic blog sites from one Wordpress installation.

[Luke Kenworthy]

You may want to look at https://www.bigtent.com/