Cannot Edit My Homepage

@ausworkshop – you should note that when I made this post I was having a bad day and couldn’t use my own brain so I was getting help on how to edit the homepage for a particular theme that I’d never dealt with.

For your situation though, you should understand, and many business owners should understand, that websites are a trade-off.

You can have many things, but I’ll name a few major things:
– Design
– Optimization
– Difficulty to Edit

Bad/Okay Design with Bad/Okay Optimization can be achieved 1000000 ways while still keeping the difficulty to edit at EASY.

You could also have Good Design OR Good Optimization and EASY difficulty to edit, which is what most site owners and business owners go for, since they like you are adamant about being able to edit their site.

Then there is the obvious, which is that you can have Great Design and Great Optimization, but then you have a site that is also very HARD to edit without good coding knowledge.

You see what I’m getting at here??

Websites are a product of an industry that involves a general skill-trade (web design/development and coding skills), and just like say – the Mechanic industry – you can’t expect to be able to fix everything in your car or truck when you buy it.

Sure if you do a little learning, you can DIY an oil change, or even something more complicated like a radiator replacement. But ultimately, when something more advanced needs to be tended to, you need to call a professional.

It’s the same thing with websites. You can’t expect at ALL to be able to control a website if you don’t know the first thing about web development and coding.

There are some people who buy a car and plan to do some minor maintenance of their own, but in reality- the majority of people buy a car knowing that they cannot control anything in regards to it’s maintenance and they are at the mercy of a trade-pro for that aspect.

Websites are the same way. The majority of people just get a website knowing they won’t be able to control any of the inner workings. They will just own the site as an entity, but it’s livelihood is at the mercy of trade-professionals once it is created.

Now like I said, some people DIY minor things that trade-pros handle, and the same can be done for websites, but you cannot EXPECT without prior negotiation for a web company to think that you aren’t like the MAJORITY who just purchase a website knowing they will need the company still for updates and maintenance.

You think every car salesman expects their customers to be in the minority that does DIY auto maintenance? No way! They sell each customer those cars thinking that those people will never open the hood themselves, because that describes the majority! Unless you say, “listen, I’m looking for a vehicle that maybe is a little modern inside in that I will be able to change the water pump, perhaps the alternator, and a few other things with relative ease since I know a thing or two – but not everything”.

What I’m saying I guess is that it just sounds to me like you didn’t consider any of this before getting your site, which I don’t blame you because owning a business has so many facets that going into each one with all the details and your head on straight is nearly impossible.

Whoever your web people were though, I doubt they meant to toy you around, they were probably just thinking you were an average site owner and understood that their role in your site would be more than just the creation. I’ve found this a lot though in my own experience: as the web professional, they should’ve double checked your true needs before contracting anything with you. The fault goes both ways is what I’m saying.

They should have checked to see if you wanted something in a more user-friendly CMS (WordPress is said to be user-friendly, but let’s be honest, at the end of the day – it’s got more potential for advanced users than beginners and is therefore a complex CMS, not a simple CMS).

Honestly sounds like you need SquareSpace or Wix, but I have to warn you again about what I was saying before…you will be making a sacrifice. SS and Wix don’t have as great of SEO capability (hell Wix you can’t even embed code without it being in <div> tags in an <iframe>…i.e. say goodbye to any schema markups). But that is the trade-off. You get EASY editing, but it lowers your maximum potential optimization, but you still keep decent design.

Ultimately though, if you want something that is SLEEK, and FULLY OPTIMIZED (and continually optimized…) then you would need a web agency of some sort to not only create, but also manage your site monthly. A truly great website is an ongoing investment. Bad to Okay sites are more of a fixed cost though as they get created and then the maintenance and management is done by the business themselves and nothing technical ever gets done with the site again until perhaps a future redesign.

Hope this all calms you down a little. I think some people jump into website ownership too quickly and just think it’s all the same. It’s very different based on your needs and wants though and until you understand that having stuff like what happened with you and your web people can be pretty overwhelming and frankly hard to understand why they would even seemingly screw you like that to begin with. After reading this though, which I hope you did, I think it will enlighten you a little and you will be ready to really decide what it is you want and know what that does or doesn’t entail in regards to what the web company you work with will create.