Novice updates (was inexpensive wysiwyg)

----- Original Message -----
> We are currently working with a customer who wants to
> be able to modify sections of text.  The three who work for that company
> are not tremendously computer literate, so my husband is designing a
> PHP-run maintanence section where they can go in an modify the necessary
> text without wreaking havoc on everything else and without having to
> learn HTML or FTP or ruin the site with frontpage garbage.

    This is an issue that I run into more and more - allowing any user with
a word processor the ability to update/post information on-line, with some
assurance that the end result will be usable. Where I work (a university),
we have some folks who can barely manage email. All too often it is these
workers who are being asked to update their departments' on-line calendars,
upload course information, and generally put information on the web just
like they've done for years as hard copy. Since I am the only fulltime
webmaster for the School, with over 100 departments and divisions, it is not
feasible for me to do this for every one. My solution so far has only been
to provide a lot of training (and hand holding), as I try to infer the
webmaster role onto the novice.
    I had hoped the simple solution would be to use the technology that
Microsoft had designed for this specific need. Office workers using Word
could open, edit, and save files on the ftp server just as easily as
accessing anything in their My Documents file. But unfortunately, that
doesn't work for most people here, probably because the University is a
jumble of Novel/Office/GroupWise/NT environments supporting php, Crystal
Reports and Access.  The solution given from top administration was for
departments to buy their secretaries a copy of FrontPage (for a Unix
server).
    SSI (server side includes) seems promising and is often used and
supported at the main campus, but I'm not sure how easily pages can be
customized. At our school, many departments originally outsourced their web
design work, and some are pretty fancy and costs big money, which makes SSI
implementation that much more of a challenge.

    My "clients", mostly doctors with important titles, want to have cool,
high tech looking web pages that their plain, low-tech office staff can work
with. For other projects I work on outside the university (freelance) I see
a similar desire, but at least there I have a uniform environment.

    Do any of you have some suggestions that may make updating web pages
easier for the inexperienced users? I currently rely on Notepad (or WordPad)
for limited html training, and WS_FTP for showing how to move files to the
server. Using other applications tends to end up as a session on the
software itself. Up till now, using comment tags to show each person where
to edit/add has been "working", but that method will fall short soon. Any
input you can provide will be appreciated.

Thank you.

--
Dennis Keibler
Univ. of Louisville
Health Sciences Center
http://www.louisville.edu/hsc/
hscweb(at)athena.louisville.edu

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