Site Maintenance
However carefully you plan your website, you are sure to want to update it after a while. You'll probably want to add details of new books, reviews of existing ones and change information that's gone out of date. You may also want to extend your site, adding new pages, articles or interactive features like polls and quizzes.
So, how should you keep your site up to date?
We offer several solutions targeted at different customers with different requirements and are happy for you to mix and match these systems to suit your requirements.
Paid-for updates
This is the easiest solution if you only update infrequently and don't
have the time or confidence to tackle the technical side of your website.
When you want a change to your site, you tell us what you want done.
We give you a price in advance based on the work involved and, if you
are happy, we go ahead and make the changes for you.
The bigger the change, the greater the cost. However, we have a minimum charge of £15 so it's worth saving up several small changes to do at once. As a guide, the minimum charge would typically cover adding a new book picture to an existing page, together with its blurb and an Amazon link.
DIY sections
DIY sections (see DIY page) are ideal for
customers who want to make frequent text only adjustments to predefined
areas of their site. DIY sections can also be used for blogging (weB
LOGGING) for those who feel an online diary is a must.
Of course, using DIY sections doesn't preclude using paid-for updates
as well.
The advantages of DIY sections are
- No special software
- Negligible learning curve
- Instant updates
- Known (low) costs
On the down side, you are very limited in your control of the appearance of the text and you can only update those areas you have predefined as DIY sections.
Full Control
If you want to update your site yourself, we will give you your FTP
login name and password so that you can carry out any changes you like.
To do this, you'll need some kind of web editing software and there are various alternatives to choose from. One that's completely free is Netscape Composer which comes as part of Netscape 7.2.
Another alternative worth considering is Macromedia's 'Contribute'. This is particularly designed for users who don't understand HTML but who want to update websites created by someone else. Several Word Pool customers are successfullly using Contribute to update their sites and the general feedback is:
Installation is trivial.
Updating text and pictures on existing pages is "delightfully easy"
Providing new pages is "not for the timid!"
You can buy Contribute from all the normal software vendors but, before you do, we recommend that you learn more about it on the Macromedia site www.macromedia.com/software/contribute and download the trial version.
Whichever software you choose, you'll find one of the main problems with adding new pages is making the necessary changes to the navigation on the rest of the site, especially if the links use graphic buttons and/or rollover techniques. If we know from the beginning that you wish to maintain the site yourself, we can design and build it to make updating as easy as possible.
Even if you opt to maintain your site yourself, you are welcome to use our paid-for service for anything you find too technically difficult and to sort things out if you make mistakes or are just too busy.