Designing sites for good causes

If you're going to design a website for a client (or organization) and you want them to be able to maintain it via blog post updates and the like, it's probably best to go with a CMS (content management system) like WordPress or Drupal. Both can be customized, and it allows the client to be able to publish their own content easily without needing to rely on you for pushing the updates to the site.

Thanks! I will be looking for CMS in my future studies. :-)

Jessica,

Building some websites for free or at a highly reduced rate can be an effective way to get some initial work put together for your portfolio, but do be careful about how many sites you build this way; you are providing an essential service for people by building their websites, and deserve to have your time and efforts compensated! A few freebies here and there at the beginning is totally fine, but once you are confident enough in your abilities, or even if you can find a friend, family member, or company that you know that is willing to give you your first paid gig (again, even if at a discounted rate from your standard), jump on it!

As far as building the client a maintainable website goes, a very simple way to go about this is to learn WordPress development. You don't need to learn all the ins and outs of theme or plugin development or anything along those lines to get started, you simply need to know the basics of their system and how to get around, build pages and posts, and maybe install a few plugins. The more you can learn about CSS and PHP will help, because then you can make tweaks to pre-existing themes if they don't fit exactly the design or structure that you're looking for, but on a basic level, you can simply dive right in with someone else's theme that they've built for use (whether free or paid) and put a site together that is simple for the client to go in and change content, which can include images very easily. That could be done in the basic WYSIWYG editor for any given page(s), and/or you could look into the Advanced Custom Fields plugin (along with its paid add-on of the "Repeater" field). This Getting Started with WordPress course will give you a brief introduction into the CMS and when/what it can be used for, then you can jump to How to Build a WordPress Blog Without Coding, and then head over to How to Make a Website with WordPress.

It's also simple enough to show a client how/what to copy/paste/edit in your raw HTML or PHP site to allow them to update content and images without the need of a CMS like WordPress, but in doing this method, you do open yourself up to potential headaches if/when the client messes something up in the code..perhaps deleting a bracket or piece of punctuation here or there, misspelling something, pointing to the wrong directory where their images are held, completely deleting all the code, etc. If you go this route, it may be best to make sure they don't have access to the server and can't FTP the new files up to override your existing files without you first testing the code. You would also want to make sure that you kept up-to-date local copies, and/or used a service like BitBucket to manage your different versions and keep your files safe.

Hope this helps!

Erik

Erik,

Thanks for the advice! Sometimes no good deed goes unpunished, as when doing work for friends and family. I will definitely look into the Wordpress courses as well as some more for career and business skills.

Best,

Jessica