We all have customers that 'want to maintain' their own site and I haven't seen a post here about Macromedia Contribute so thought you might be interested in the product.

Let's start by saying this is a wonderful product. I developed the new website in Dreamweaver using templates then 'converted' the site to Contribute (took about 10 minutes)

Contribute allows me (the site administrator) to set up profiles of each person in the client organization - some can edit pages but not publish and some can edit and publish pages plus approve pages that others have edited to be published.

Contribute gives the client access to their website through a standard web browser (that is password enabled) they can navigate through the site to the page they want to edit - click the edit key and edit anything on the page that is not protected by my template.

Contribute gives the client control over the text (size, color, bold, alignment) and even contains a rather rudimentary photo editor.

The product costs $150 and the one drawback is that the webmaster/administrator not only requires Dreamweaver but also must purchase the Contribute product for their computer - so remember to add the cost of Contribute to the cost estimate that you give to your client.

It appears to me that anyone who is reasonable competent with Microsoft Word will find Contribute easy to use.

thats sounds very good did I understand this right? it allows your cusomters to edit their site easily?

Yes, customers can easily edit their own site (within the parameters I allow through Contribute).

Contribute provide the customer with a secure FTP logon (prevents anybody but that person from accessing the site with edit capability). They edit the site using a browser that is built in to the Contribute software. Editing is really very similar to using a word processing program.

Contribute includes 'Check in / Check out' (so I can't edit the same page they are working on and vice versa) plus I have set up the site so it stores the last six versions of each page to allow me to 'roll-back' the page to a previous working version if they actually do find a way to hurt themselves.