Interesting, we just got a call from a company offering to host content management sites for $250 a month.

In the last month or so we have been experimenting with an Open Source content management application, WordPress.

We have found it to be extremely powerful and flexible. A large number of paid for content management is based on open source and generally is not good value for money, especially if you are a web developer. If anyone wants content management we install WordPress, a free application based on php and mySQL and apply a custom designed template. It is no more complex than a site designed in XHTML CSS. We build static pages and navigation as content to be managed as well as user feedback, and RSS blog type pages as subscription feeds. This is a normal web design fee plus normal hosting. Some training may be required for client generated editing but as a browser based system it is very straight forward.

Too many times we have had clients call to say that under a monthly fee system, their contract term has expired prior to getting enough time to get their content in order. They did not have time to learn how to set up the pages and navigation let alone the text or images. Good content management is supposed to allow clients and or their employees to add content as required as soon as possible so that their site is current and reflects any change that occurs. For those clients whose content is updated on a daily basis this can save a lot of money. For sites that are basically static apart from the odd alteration $250 a month is a rip off.

$250 a month is 10 times what our normal hosting fee would be anyway, so beware the content management scammers.