Web Content Management System

Hi

I developed many websites and make a living off two, where lawyers pay to list their firm as advertisement, and a third for my real estate investing career (my main career)

I was looking to start a web design company as many people have asked me to do a website for them in the past, but I've declined.

The main reason was I didn't want to have to be constantly maintaing sites for other people.

But I think maybe a content management system or a web cms, at that may be the answer to that problem.

Firstly, do I understand correctly when I think a cms can be deployed on an existing website built using dreamweaver, that would then allow non-technical users (the people I design sites for) to access the cms and make changes to the website?

For example, could I install a cms on my already existing website, www.yourhouseintocash.com and have it look exactly thesame as it does now, but let someone, or even me have the ability to make changes to the site without using/knowing dreamweaver or another program similiar to dreamweaver?

Secondly, if my thinking is correct, can anyone recommend a good web cms that would suit my purposes and doesn't take a rocket scientist with 3 phds to figure out how to install, and use?

I think opencms.org looks pretty good (and like it would suit my purpose) but the support and instructions on setting it up are written for geniuses and therefore completely 100% useless to me.

Lastly, if my thinking on a cms is not quite correct, can someone recommend something that would suit my purpose? IE, allowing non technical people to make changes to their site after I've designed it for them in dreamweaver.

Thank you so much!

 

If you have a budget of some sort I can provide you what you need. It is however an in house CMS. You can manage all of your sites from one admin panel or you can set it up on individual sites and let them change content, etc. The CMS can do a range of things, is fully standards compliant and comes with a full blown e-commerce solution if needed.

I can send some examples if you want to shoot me a pm.
Nigel

 

At the risk of being cut down by Nigel, I would say Joomla or Wordpress. Joomla if you would like to expand to listing real estate and other functions, Wordpress if you simply want to share information.

 

I love wordpress This would actually sort of work for him http://wpremix.com/

Nigel

 

MODx is a wonderful and free (open source) web-based CMS that I've integrated on many sites. My web development company's site (see: www.keyato.com) is using it, as are all of my clients who needed a CMS solution. It's stupidly simple to set up and use and, yes, you should be able to easily integrate into your existing site. It would look exactly the same and editing pages with MODx is as easy as Microsoft Word.

Installation is easy as pie - upload the files to your server and browse to the install.php and follow the simple on-screen instructions. Fill in your site's name and a few options and you're done. Oh, you'll also need to know how to CHMOD folders in your FTP client - it's very easy and all explained in the MODx installation. If you need help or have no idea what CHMODing is, you can PM me for help.

They also have a guide to integrating MODx into your template:
http://modxcms.com/adding-tags.html

If you need help or have any other questions about MODx, feel free to PM me. There are probably other CMSes that will do, but I've had great success with MODx and it's free (always a plus =P).

 

Is it possible to integrate ModX with any good forum like vBulletin / IPB / SMF ?

 

That depends. Where on the page did you want to put the content?