point today at plasticbag.org. I enjoy using Blogger, but as a point of principle it’s important to have a variety of tools available for content management.

Personally, I don’t think it’s viable to ever do a site, even a small site, without integrating a means to manage the writing (at least) without messing with the raw html files. I’ve done lots of small sites for people who haven’t made a big commitment to a web strategy – they just want a little website.

When I do a site like that I am available to make updates – but those sites have usually been done as a favour, for free. I don’t always have the time to maintain them fully. So I generally try and download most or all of the update responsibility for updates to my “client” – usually a friend or someone like that. And they always mess them up.

So for me, it’s really important that there are options available for content management, that the tools are being developed.

I’m starting to put this idea to the test today, when I (finally) have my first real meeting with the nice people at Santropol Roulant, for whom I’m putting together a small team to build a site as a donation. The idea is to do a well-designed, professional quality site for the organization – an important meals on wheels service here in Montreal. So we’re going to start to define the project today, and implicit in the project definition will be to include content management tools so they can “own” the daily management of their own site.