Update to your website with email (Startup Weekend project)
Hi,
My wife and I are having our 2nd baby in ~4 weeks and my wife gave me a free weekend! So now I'm spending my last free weekend building a project with my friend in Startup Weekend event :)
Here is our problem: Web designer builds a website and delivers it to the client. After few weeks, the client sends an email asking for "small updates because they don't know how to use the CMS" to the website. The web designer is already juggling with multiple projects but he wants to finish the project completely so he logs in on the CMS and copy&pastes the content from client's email. If you have 20 clients, what happens if 50% of them are doing this on weekly basis.
We're building a thing that enables the client to update small parts of their website via email. The client emails the content to the system and it will publish it on the website using dynamic javascript tag.
So in the spirit of validating our idea and solution:
- If you have built websites for a client, do they keep asking you to do small updates even when the project is completed?
- Does the client have other ways to update their website? (a cms?)
Our project mvp is at https://iorma.xyz (cheapest domain we could find!)
We have still few hours tomorrow (Sunday) until the final presentations so all feedback is appreciated!
Hi tuomasj, I had a need for something like this at a previous startup I worked at. The corporate website needed updating, but it was a custom-built site, not a CMS. The people who needed to update the site were non-technical and not able to make changes themselves. I have always thought that something like this would be cool, but never had the idea of handling the edits via email.
I'm curious how you enable targeted edits via email. An example scenario might be a typo in the name of the 3rd person on the 'About' page of the website. Or are you focused on higher-level edits, e.g. the content of an entire page?
One option you might consider for the future is to allow inline editing of the site directly, perhaps via a browser extension.
Keep us updated with how you go, and good luck with your final presentation!
It was a fun weekend, but we came up empty.
I guess our presentation was a bit too long. We spent too many slides explaining the problem and just explained the solution/product just at the end of the presentation.
We were the only team with working product :)
Yeah, we have found that the easy & simple solutions to update the site for non-technical people might be just too complicated.
For example, one use case could be a restaurant that needs to update their lunch menu every week.
Thanks for your feedback, I'll keep you posted!