Updating Your Own Site: More than you bargained for!

You hired someone to build a website for you. Now it's complete and on the web, but you want to make some changes yourself.

You may think that updating your own website is simple, but you could be getting in over your head. If you accidentally delete a file, or edit it in an undesired way, would you be able to fix the file yourself?

Here are a few questions that you should ask yourself before attempting to alter your website.

Do you know enough HTML?

HTML isn’t a very difficult language to understand if you’ve had some experience with it. <p> stands for Paragraph, <div> stands for Division, <li> stands for Line, etc. But the code can be difficult to edit if you haven’t done it before.

If you don’t know how pages interact with each other through links, how to place elements into a page with code (example: <img src="images/image1.gif" />), or how different browsers interpret the same code in different ways, you may want to let your website designer to be responsible for all major changes to your website.

Was any part of your website made in Flash?

Flash is a great way to create animations and dynamic elements for your website. One drawback to Flash is that you must have the Adobe Flash program to create or edit Flash files. Unless you have the program and the knowledge how to use it, your designer will have to alter these files for you.

Can you resize images to exact specifications?

Website graphics are images that are arranged in a creative way to give a website its look and feel. You can think of them like puzzle pieces. They are a specific size and are placed in a specific location with HTML & CSS.

If you place an image that is the incorrect size, it may completely throw off the layout of the rest of the page. Unless you can create/edit these image files to the exact specifications, you should let your designer prepare graphic files and images so they fit perfectly into place.

You can probably tell I personally recommend that you let the person who built the site be responsible for all major changes.

Of course, there are minor changes to text that you should be able to make without having to contact your web designer. If you need some help learning to make minor changes to your website, see if your designer will write up a step-by-step document that will instruct you how to make those changes on your own.