I've noticed a lot of web designers offer some kind of CMS with the sites they sell/design.

I've only used Shado which we use at work and its pretty poor/complicated and I couldn't imagine something like this being offered to clients wanting a basic site and with little web design skills.

What are popular CMS packages for small static websites?

What do you think about offering a CMS for a site you sell/make for someone?

Do you charge extra?

Do you prefer not to offer CMS as it can devoid you off update charges in the future?

Thanks.

I recently did some work for an organization that wanted a CMS set up. Frankly, I found it to be a complete and total pain in the derrier to work with, but I do have to admit for a group of not-too-savvy computer users wanting to share information and manage their site through a control panel, it was nice. So IMO, a lot would depend on the needs of the company/organization I guess but personally, I choose to avoid working with them.

Maybe others are better, I don't have a lot of experience with them, but the particular one I worked with only had one design. therefore, the sites all looked the same with the only difference being color schemes and one was very limited in making changes.

Since we're talking about these, does anyone know if there is a really good CMS for both a designer and a client? Would be a good thing to know...thanks.

As I said we use Shado at work for our website which has 1000s of pages so I expect it would be overkill for smaller sites. Its very clunky and when editing content lots of issues can arise.

Not being able to change the design sounds far too limiting. I was imagining you would create your site then add 'containers' for the text and then once you log into a 'control panel' you can edit the text but nothing else.

I remember Macromedia had a product called Contribute - did anything come of this?

Yeah. Macromedia got bought out by Adobe and they made an even bigger mess out of the product than it already was. (To this day, it baffles me as to how Adobe could have actually made a set of crappy products by a crappy company even worse, but they pulled it off.)

Personally, the only CMSes I ever offer are custom. The ones that are out there create bloated code, are actually more difficult to work with, and I spend more time fixing up the errors in them than I would to create things from scratch myself.

I offer a CMS if the customer asks for one, or if I recommend using one if it will be beneficial to them. Yes the cost is extra and part of the overall package, and things like updates/upgrades are all accounted for on a customer by customer basis. Typically if an upgrade comes out the customer gets billed for the cost.

A year or so ago I realised that a CMS would be a great thing to offer my clients. Because they don't have the technical knowledge to update their website, in my opinion it is essential that they have a way to update their website - whether this is via a CMS or a content maintenance service that my company provides. And in some situations, a CMS is just the best option.

I am currently working on updating my CMS so that it has inline content editing - so that when the admin is logged in he can double click anywhere to instantly edit the content. In my opinion this will make updating even easier for the client...

I'll offer a CMS solution to a client if it makes sense. If a client is looking for a 10 page site that isn't going to change much then it doesn't make sense, but if they plan on adding new content daily a CMS might be a good choice.

I actually think WordPress works very well as a lightweight CMS and with a few plugins it grows more robust. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it for everything, but it can work well with a lot of sites.

A couple of other popular CMS applications are Drupal and Joomla. I haven't really worked with either enough to offer more than their names. I have heard a lot of good about Drupal specifically, though most will say it's more difficult to work with than WordPress.

But the choice really comes down to what the client wants and what would be an appropriate solution.

Thanks for the input. I might instal Durpal and have a look, don't suppose you can demo it anywhere?

I use Macromedia Contribute it works well for most pages, it does however have issues with some pages for unkown reasons. I used Joomla for awhile but it has many security holes which can open your site up to hackers, so Joomla needs to be updated often. I have been looking for a better cms myself I will check out some of the others that have been listed here.

I also agree that you can offer them in certain instances but they are mostly more hassle than they are worth. Especially when you want to create your own custom templates for simple things like graphics and text changes it often takes longer than just building what you need from scratch. Drupal is one I have found that is well commented out and has a nice user support forum.

I build a CMS into the applications I develop so the client can continue to use it after I'm gone. If they didn't need the CMS they wouldnt really need me in the first place, but i also build them into my own sites, it just makes things easier