I've started doing a bit of work on a website for my mum's cake business. She has a website now which she likes to change things and add more pictures to.

How do I let my mum do that to a website I've made. I assume some kind of CMS or maybe a HTML editor which she can edit things herself maybe. The site is at http://www.chrishigs.co.uk/cakes if anyone wants a look.

And any criticism or advice for the site would be good too. My first time making anything like that (apart from a Britney Spears gallery many moons ago) so it's very basic for now.

Her current site is which, IMO, needs a lot of work and requires Flash.

Not quite sure if I'm wording this the right way, but it seems you've approached this from the "I need to create a website, and websites have X/Y/Z" angle, rather than by asking "Who is the intended/potential audience?"

More that I designed something simpler than what she has now (mostly a practise exercise for me) and thought she would like it. Which she does but also likes to change and add stuff so I wondered what might be the easiest way to do that.

Maybe a site designed around her requirements, built on CMS?

Just having a look at Cushy CMS. Looks pretty easy to use and implement. Hopefully it will satisfy her requirements.

Part of the problem is that when she asked me to make a website 18 months or so ago I didn't have a clue what to do so said no. My sister helped her make a website with Moonfruit and she doesn't want to lose all the work they put into that site.

Ask her to send any updates to you, for you to add manually.

It will be a fraction of the work and heartache for all concerned, especially you.

If she decides to use my website I think I could have the text editable with Cushy so she can change whatever wording, titles, etc. she wants and bigger things leave them to me so it doesn't mess the site up.

Currently looking at CushyCMS for editing certain text areas and Juicebox for gallery making. Won't be as simple as her current wysiwyg approach so she won't be able to add pages and move shit around (good) but should do part of what she wants.

Personally I think the whole site needs to be simpler and less cluttered anyway so I will have to sit down with her soon and see what we can do about things.

I set up a backend-only CMS for a client using pyrocms, which is a lot more simple and bullet-proof to build and maintain than a full blown wordpress/joomla-stylee CMS (ugh). At least it was a couple of years ago (haven't looked at it since).

The live site loads editable stuff (very limited, a few text blocks on a couple of pages) from the same mysql db tables.

I was going to try one of those on my webspace earlier but for some reason thought in didn't have PHP on my Windows hosting. Seems I do have 5.3.5. Maybe I will try Pyro is something. Thanks.

Approximately half of her requirements will be wrong. Being able to edit live content may or not be included in that.

CMSs are fine and a good idea to use in the right situation, but they can also get in the way of just making things work. If you're not already comfortable with a particular package, using a CMS for a small site can be a useful learning experience and/or unnecessary hassle. I'd probably say only go for it if you have plenty of time to spend in learning something, otherwise it might end up a chore.

The existing site could do with being modernised and better organised. It probably doesn't need to be over-simplified; again, it's a question of knowing the target audience.

Thanks Pete.

Good point about the live editing. It's actually one of the things I don't like about her current site, that's the only way to change anything. I might have been able to help her out with it more if I could have shown her something offline without changing her running site too much and she not being happy with it. I don't really know where to start with that site which is why I went for a full redesign.

The Chumby or whatever it was called (I'm half asleep and can't be bothered to go check) is pretty simple to implement, more so than I was expecting. A full CMS with templates, adding extra content, etc. would be something different and more time consuming.

After all this she may not be happy to switch anyway.

Some comments perhaps related to what Peter said:

If you have a 'Home' page, you don't also need a 'Prices', 'Testimonials' and 'Contact Us' page - all that info can go on the otherwise useless home page. People visiting the site probably don't care about fluff like "With cakes baked and iced to perfection, Icing to Slicing has become the cake to admire and enjoy." What does that even mean? Try to really limit the marketing-speak to stuff that's actually useful, things people coming to the site might want to know. If I were to guess, I'd say they want to see examples of the cakes she's made, associated prices, and a phone number or email address so they can ask for more details.

Also the "Take a look at my Facebook page for more ideas" needs a link to the Facebook page in question.

Oh and make it mobile-friendly. With a site that simple it shouldn't be hard. I can advise there if you need help.

edit: some kind of colour management issue means the background colour on the logo image doesn't match that of the element it's in (Chrome 29, Windows 7).

Thanks for all that. The text was taken straight from her current website. In my opinion, and it's a bit awkward recommending some of the changes, or giving advice, it's too rambly with too much text. Needs simplifying, not so many pictures, not 5 pictures of one cake.

I think, rather than remake the website in proper HTML, I'll help her design a better site on Moonfruit, at least for now. The V6 editor, HTML 5 instead of Flash has some mobile site stuff so that'll help too. Currently anything without Flash gets a page that that looks nothing like the site. Black and white with the text and images randomly amongst it. The Facebook link was probably copied from the old site and not turned into a link yet.

I was quite excited about getting a website that I designed up and running but that's not gonna happen yet I think.

"Try to really limit the marketing-speak to stuff that's actually useful"

While that may well reflect how you and I view marketing (stupid frippery that just gets in the way), it may affect other people very differently. People don't actually need cakes, and it's not like they're rare or anything. There's plenty of competition, ranging from other bakers to cake mixes and cakes at the supermarket. If you're going to sell them, you probably have to /sell/ them. If marketing was completely ineffectual on everybody, it wouldn't exist. So yeah, people of the cake-buying tribe actually do care about fluff.

Personally I prefer the text I wrote at http://hhhjjj.moonfruit.com I was having a play with their new editor. Who needs marketing speak?

There's a difference between meaningless fluff nonsense, and actual marketing. I'm not saying to be completely literal and stick only to facts, but the text has to contain some useful information.

I thought it was going to turn into a Buba-Shrimp story. I left a little disappointed but overall I approve of your approach! 

:D Unfortunately I don't think she will go with that sort of approach :(

Been playing with some designs on Moonfruit. My favourite so far is http://pigglypoo.moonfruit.com which I think looks rather nice. Needs work and the pictures in the middle don't look quite right.