Letting clients edit sites

In my day job I work for a large company and don't have to worry about the details of this, but on the rare occasion I do freelance work I've never had a good solution...

Say you design a site from scratch for a client. Valid HTML, CSS, and all that. You have everything ready to go, and now the client needs to be able to edit the site going forward. In the past I've just told them to get a decent authoring tool or had them come to me for even simple text changes.

I'm sure this isn't the best way to do it. From a little bit of reading it seems the solution these days might be to integrate with some sort of CMS -- say Drupal, Joomla or WordPress.

What do you folks do? CMS or something else? My freelance clients are mostly small local outfits, if that makes a difference.

I've found that most clients are not technically literate enough to edit their own sites even if you provide them with a way to do so and train them. There are some exceptions, but that's what I've experienced for the most part. Most websites of that type don't need updated that often, so the person will tends to forget any training before they actually use it enough to remember it.

I've had better luck with getting clients to understand WordPress than Drupal or Joomla, but WordPress isn't much good for anything except blogs and simple informational sites. The admin UIs for Drupal and Joomla are both considerably more complicated and not really suitable for non-technical people.

Good points. Sounds like I was at least right that's it not uncommon to set up some sort of CMS. I think I'll look into what's involved with converting a site to use one of those. Are WordPress, Drupal and Joomla the most common answers, or is there something else I should look into?

I would say those are definitely the top three most common for non-e-commerce sites, at least as far as PHP software goes.

Thanks!

cushycms saved my tail a few times!