And the Beat Goes On

I am amazed at how truly easy it is to get a website going now.

In the past few weeks, I have done some projects for people, and have been reintroducing myself to some of the bountiful world-o-plenty out there these days.
I started building sites right before the Internet bubble burst, back in 1998. Horrible sites, they were indeed. But there was a fair amount of complexity in getting an html site to render properly everywhere. So we got hired to make it so, and things were good.

Always Changing
In the early 2000's, I started to see a rise of better coding, better websites. I learned .asp, and tried to keep up - but it was getting increasingly hard to stay on top of new things, they were simply changing so quickly. But we were all busy, because someone had to do it.

Cut to this week. I start a hosting account for a client, and literally have 3 sites built and live within 2 hours. Granted, they were blogs, and from easy one-button installations, but that is exactly the point. It was soooo easy.

Another thing I have wanted to do for my clients for years, is to connect a CMS to their site so that they can maintain it themselves. But, the technology behind all that was fairly expensive back in the early 2000's, so I kept little bits of code here and there when they were appropriate. But I never did get a full-fledged CMS tool out of it - those that could do the coding, wouldn't unless there was a lot of money involved.

Cut to this week. I build a template of a couple page designs in less than one day. These will be the framework for a 70 page site, that is built to grow over time. I will be able to migrate all the existing content into this format in a couple of days. Using a Dreamweaver page template and connecting the owners with Adobe Contribute, they have 100% editing power. A CMS that works like a charm.

Change is As it Is
Point is, the only constant is change. All these things involved in creating and maintaining a website change the way I can offer value to my clients. The more I know about how to save them money and still deliver a strong product (very important) the more valuable I am. So I look for things like the Contribute set-up, and I know what to recommend to my clients so we both get what we want.

Stay on top of as much of this stuff as you can. Web technology, coding standards, options and opportunities. It is always changing. If this aspect of freelance seo writing is more frustrating than energizing, you are probably in the wrong line of work.

Frankly, I love being able to offer more to clients, even if I have to rely on new open-source, or "borrowed" technology to do it. In the old days, people who built things were very protective and anal about it. My old coding buddies would berate me for saying so, but I like the shortcuts out there these days - it's nice to have better, out of the box solutions that are affordable.