For example, you may have a web designer come up with a look for your site. Make sure you ask for a written description of this look. This is called a style guide. A style guide may relate to the combination of colors on a site, each page’s layout, the feel of the writing on the site, or all of the previous. The style guide itself may be online, in electronic form, or even a physical booklet. The style guide will not only help you understand the work that is going in to developing your site, it is also a very valuable resource. A style guide allows someone who has never worked on you site before to edit your current pages and add new pages to your site while maintaining the look and feel of the overall website. This guarantees that your site will not only look good the first day it goes live, but that your site will continue to look good after years of edits and updates.

You may still want to have your web designer come back and do maintenance on your site, but you do not want to have to call your designer every time you want to add copy or edit your contacts page.

Here is a site that allows the owner to edit some important information on the site easily. Stock.Netlumination is a site that displays some of my photos. The potential buyer will enter the site through the home page. When I want to change information about photos, or add photos, I go to this, the editing page.

Normally this page would be password protected, but I left it accessible to the public, so I can demonstrate its features. If you click on a photo in the editing mode, you are taken to a page where you can modify the information without having to deal with any messy XHTML code. For example, here is a page that would allow me to edit information about one of my photos of Mount Hood, simply by changing the prefilled form and entering the correct password. Once I hit submit, the site will automatically generate the necessary code, and it will update to display the new information.

Having pages like this will enable you to have better and more direct control over your site. It will allow your web developer to concentrate on maintaining the accessibility, look, and feel of the siste, while allowing you to control its content.

As you design your web page with you web developer, make sure you spend some time thinking about what parts of your site you will want to be able to easily edit yourself.