Handing over a website to clients

Classic General
1

Hello Everyone,

I have been recently wondering how you could give a website over to a client when you are finished designing it, so that they can update it?

I know that things like Total CMS by Joe Workman exist, and then you can have an admin page, but I am wanting to give them the whole project. Only thing is, they probably wont want to buy Rapidweaver.

Thanks, Jesse

2

You can’t. It’s Rapidweaver’s biggest limitation. In order for the client to run the site - update it, add new pages etc. they have to have RW and all the stacks and plugins you’ve used to create the site. I imagine it’s exactly the same with Elements.

The other side of the coin is this: even when I’ve provided simple tools to update content, very few of the clients I’ve had over the years have ever actually used them consistently. Once built, the website tends to ‘sit there’!

3

OK. Thanks @robbeattie.

4

And you would need to teach them to use it. Many clients will break things which you will have to fix again. Therefore I normally do small changes for free and charge for the more time consuming things.

5

In my opinion, the project file always belongs to the developer - the final product is a published site and that can be handed over if the client wishes, but with explicit limitations on support.

That’s why, in my contracts, I always specify that the customer only has the rights to the published version of the site, and not the project file itself. This means that if they want to hire someone else to maintain the site, that party will need to do so in the existing published source code, or reverse engineer the site into something that they can work with.

The reason is three-fold.

  1. Like you said, the client or whoever they’d hire would need to own and know how to use RapidWeaver
  2. Even if they did, they would have to own every single stack or framework that I used to build the site (which is getting impossible with all the frameworks disappearing one-by-one).
  3. It would mean that I would have to hand over my own personal code as well, which I’m not willing to do, as it’s my property.

With Elements, things are slightly easier - the generated site is Tailwind, which is an industry standard, so reverse engineering it would be easier. But still, for those sites I wouldn’t hand over the project file either (as that file is specific to Elements, and would also include code of my own design in my case).

Cheers,
Erwin

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