Adding blog to existing site

[Haze]

HI,

Just wondered what the general consensus was on adding a blog to an existing site. I have had a few communications recently regards interest in adding a blog to a site. But isn't it better to build the site in the likes of Wordpress beforehand, rather than to add a "separate page" which uses WP to blog with? Or perhaps to add a "news" page to post news about the site? I've read conflicting opinions when Googling.

[Dom]

I've never had to add a blog to an existing site, but presumably you could just install WordPress alongside the existing site, in a folder called "blog" for example. So your blog might be located in yourwebsite.com/blog/


You can create a WordPress template to match the look of the rest of the site, then Bob's your mother's brother. It'd get a bit trickier if you needed to integrate the WordPress login with any existing login systems though.

[Haze]

No exisiting login details for the site. Is there any way to restrict the number of pages the account holder can start? Last thing I'd want is to have a customer have total access to setting up many pages in WP on a subdirectory... they'll all want to do it if one does...

[Rosco]

There are different user 'roles' in Wordpress, you could set up the client as an Author and they could publish blog posts but not have access to normal pages

[Haze]

Thanks for the info, all very useful.

I did also wonder about incorporation of twitter and LinkedIn details to an existing site. As more and more people are using these I am looking to incorporate these into existing sites. I have found a few Twitter widgets but LinkedIn widgets seem a bit rarer, could anyone recommend some they have used...?

[Rosco]

Rather than learning how to bolt separate blogs and widgets and whatever onto small static sites, I'd suggest investing time in learning a decent CMS (such as Wordpress) and offering your existing clients an upgrade to a platform where they are more in control of their content and business strategy. Sell them the idea of a better system that will benefit their business and save them time and money, rather than trying to bolt lots of unrelated and unintegrated crap onto their previous brochureware sites on the cheap.

Learn and sell the solutions that will benefit your client's business, not the methods that you already know or believe to be quicker and easier (for you).  You will reap the benefits in such an investement when the word spreads that you know what you're doing and are providing solutions that empower your clients in the mystical ways of content management and social media marketing

[suedenem]

And then charge them consultancy rates when they f*ck up their Google ranking because their mate at the pub told them to stuff keywords into white text on a white background and engage in dodgy link schemes

The other problem is the cost justification of up-front CMS work simply isn't there a lot of the time (especially for small businesses).  Let's take a fairly typical bespoke site design with 8-15 pages, which would cost in the region of £2,500:

	Site - No CMS	Site - Wordpress
Bespoke design, revisions, HTML	£2,500	£2,500
Install WP, setup, security hardening, build theme templates from bespoke design	N/A	from £1,000
Training, documentation & handholding	N/A	£400
Client-requested content changes	typically £400/yr	N/A
EITHER: WP security updates – install in staging environment, check theme & plugin compatibility, disable broken plugins, find alternative way to achieve same functionality, roll out to live site	N/A	from £50/mth (£600/yr)
OR: Fix WP installation when client invariably neglects to install updates, allowing Indonesian hackers to exploit vulnerability.  Repair site trust with users and search engines	N/A	from[/i ]£600/occurance
Year One Costs	typically £2,900	from £4,500
Yearly Cost Thereafter	typically £400	from £600

The difference could pay for either a fair bit of extra SEO work, advertising, a couple of email campaigns, or a day or so of consultancy - all of which are likely to provide a better ROI than being able to personally manage content.

[sarahA]

  We clearly don't charge enough... 

Considering I could probably do the install, hardening and templating in about 4-5 hours (for a standard template), I could just do one of those a week and be quite happy 

[suedenem]

Considering I could probably do the install, hardening and templating in about 4-5 hours (for a standard template), I could just do one of those a week and be quite happy 

I can't remember the last time we had to work with a 'standard' template.  There are several page types that we would normally have to deal with that require templates:

• home page
• 'standard' info page
• category-level page
• contact pages, including overview page with contact form and branch pages, each with maps, directions and so on

technical product sheets

• FAQ pages
• vacancies
• bespoke campaign landing pages

And it's always bespoke to each client, so there are always straggly bits of coding, post types, custom attributes and so on which need doing.  Security hardening includes internal audits of any plugins we might want to use... our clients weren't caught out with the TimThumb vulnerability :-)

That's usually 2 or 3 man days by the time it's all done, especially as all work is subject to separate internal review.

We clearly don't charge enough... 

I suspect not... technicians-turned-entrepreneurs rarely do ;-)

[sarahA]

Hmm depends on how small a small business is (appreciate this can be up to 50 employees) and what they require. Most of the small businesses we deal with are only after brochure style sites with a contact form and news section. Some may require something extra, most of which would be custom coded. There's so much you can do with WP direct now and I personally think it's better to do it yourself if you can if it's financially viable. We try to avoid other plugins where possible and those that we use we know well.

£1000 for 2-3 days work is a bit more understandable

[familychoice]

I can't remember the last time we had to work with a 'standard' template.  There are several page types that we would normally have to deal with that require templates:

• home page
• 'standard' info page
• category-level page
• contact pages, including overview page with contact form and branch pages, each with maps, directions and so on

technical product sheets

• FAQ pages
• vacancies
• bespoke campaign landing pages

Add in some product, gallery, portfolio and testimonial page templates and you've got most of the elements for a standard theme that will cover most business requirements. Most of the page types you've listed though could share the same page template but with variations of widget and shortcode placement.

If you build enough Wordpress sites then you'll have a repository of custom page templates, shortcodes, widgets, custom fields, plugins and functions that should provide you with a framework for most projects. I can see there are 'special cases' where additional custom coding and fiddling are required that will push the hours/cost up but £3,500 sounds an awful lot for a standard 8-15 page Wordpress site.

[Jem]

We clearly don't charge enough... 

Glad I wasn't the only one who thought that.

We clearly have the wrong sort of clients

[Steve Lampkins]

You need to get into the mindset of 'how much can I take the piss'.

[suedenem]

We clearly don't charge enough... 

Glad I wasn't the only one who thought that.

We clearly have the wrong sort of clients

Possibly.  You are, to your own admission, around £5K underpaid, bemoan the price of mortgages and you had the dilemma of whether to move partly because of estate agent fees of ~£230, despite clearly being very good in your chosen field of coding.  Perhaps reassessing your market strategy would be worthwhile. (By "your market strategy", I mean either the company you work for or you yourself in the job market).

Now, I know that scrimping around for deposits and suchlike is almost a rite of passage, but it does help if you recognise the value of the work you do and ask for a fair return on that work :-)

Take a look at some old posts from Vee; she's crafted a good little design business by identifying a profitable market and successfully tailoring her offering.  Technically she's got a solid eye for design, although I suspect that you'd match her level of technical skill in your own specialism.  The difference?  She recognises the value that she gives her clients, keeps her eye on the market and what it expects and will charge appropriately for her work.

I can see there are 'special cases' where additional custom coding and fiddling are required that will push the hours/cost up but £3,500 sounds an awful lot for a standard 8-15 page Wordpress site.

It's not that much, really; only another 40% on top of a basic design/HTML template build.  The thrust of my point - that the extra cost of a CMS is often not worthwhile - remains for those engaged in the race to the bottom.  Those charging a grand for a basic (non-WP) site would probably quite reasonably charge around £1,400 for a WP-powered site.

Incidentally, I used to charge stupidly low prices for work many moons ago, until I realised that it just wasn't sustainable.  Charge low prices and you'll only attract clients who will pay low prices.  You'll also be out of work in a few years time when the big boys get their act together, unless you can demonstrate value above and beyond what clients can get for free if they do it themselves.

[familychoice]

It's not that much, really; only another 40% on top of a basic design/HTML template build. 

There's additional work involved in creating a 'static' site that you don't need to do when building a WP site. If you're used to building sites in WP then I can't see how it could possibly take almost twice as long to build the site. That's too much.

Incidentally, I used to charge stupidly low prices for work many moons ago, until I realised that it just wasn't sustainable.  Charge low prices and you'll only attract clients who will pay low prices. 

That's true to a certain extent. Yes, if you charge peanuts then you'll attract the worst possible type of client (been there done that) but if you're charging more than the local average - and your charges are around 50% more than what even the swankiest companies here are charging - then you'll go bust.

I'm not having a go, I find your posts highly illuminating, and in fact I took some of your .Net forum advice on board a couple of years ago when I realised I was massively undercharging. I put up my prices and had a fantastic year or so and there was plenty of work around. A year or so later the work started dropping off. I did some digging and found that all the local companies were charging less, and in every case price was listed as the main consideration for choosing a particular web company. I tweaked my prices down a bit and the work's slowly filtering back in.

Maybe you have more time and resources to network and promote your services, maybe you're just lucky and able to get away with it in your area. It's not the same for everyone though, so telling people they're undercharging for what they do isn't always good advice.

You'll also be out of work in a few years time when the big boys get their act together, unless you can demonstrate value above and beyond what clients can get for free if they do it themselves.

Yeah right.

[Jem]

Possibly.  You are, to your own admission, around £5K underpaid, bemoan the price of mortgages and you had the dilemma of whether to move partly because of estate agent fees of ~£230, despite clearly being very good in your chosen field of coding.  Perhaps reassessing your market strategy would be worthwhile. (By "your market strategy", I mean either the company you work for or you yourself in the job market).

Now, I know that scrimping around for deposits and suchlike is almost a rite of passage, but it does help if you recognise the value of the work you do and ask for a fair return on that work :-)

Catch up - we bought a house and put down a £30k deposit

I know I'm underpaid. I know I will never really progress in the job I'm in. As I said in Dom's thread, this is of little importance to me *right now* because I am (relatively) happy with the situation.

That said, I have considered going freelance or something similar. I struggle with
a) the focus needed to make it work
b) the idea of being independent
c) how to market myself
d) where to begin
e) plucking up the courage to make such a massive change to my life with a child to (co-)support

And so on.

[suedenem]

There's additional work involved in creating a 'static' site that you don't need to do when building a WP site. If you're used to building sites in WP then I can't see how it could possibly take almost twice as long to build the site. That's too much.

There is different work, although we've found that a WP site still takes around 30-40% longer than a simple static site, all in.  We also charge different rates; HTML web monkey work is charged less than PHP coding, for example.

That's true to a certain extent. Yes, if you charge peanuts then you'll attract the worst possible type of client (been there done that) but if you're charging more than the local average - and your charges are around 50% more than what even the swankiest companies here are charging - then you'll go bust.

I'm not having a go, I find your posts highly illuminating, and in fact I took some of your .Net forum advice on board a couple of years ago when I realised I was massively undercharging. I put up my prices and had a fantastic year or so and there was plenty of work around. A year or so later the work started dropping off. I did some digging and found that all the local companies were charging less, and in every case price was listed as the main consideration for choosing a particular web company. I tweaked my prices down a bit and the work's slowly filtering back in.

Maybe you have more time and resources to network and promote your services, maybe you're just lucky and able to get away with it in your area. It's not the same for everyone though, so telling people they're undercharging for what they do isn't always good advice.

I do understand that there are local market forces at play.  I wouldn't suggest that everyone charges what we charge (although I'd still bet that you'd be underselling yourselves ;-)).  We'll occasionally knock out a £1,200 WP site if a local small company approaches, just to keep goodwill, but that'll be installation of WP and an off-the-shelf theme with the smallest amount of customisation (such as adding their logo).

The breakdown in my original post was only meant to illustrate that value isn't always gained from a CMS-driven site (using 'ballpark' pricing); feel free to scale down - the thrust is still the same.  It was only when you, Sarah and Jem replied that I fully justified the cost ;-)

As for networking and so on, I make time for it.  Hold some local seminars.  Leaflet a few local businesses.  Talk to local leaders.  Join the local chamber.  If you get across your passion for what you do, people will see the added value that you can bring, and you'll be able to charge accordingly.

Sarah - if you're still reading - I'd be looking to take advantage of Google's 3 month Liverpool residency if I were you.  There's quite a bit of press about getting Liverpool businesses online; tap into that and you should get a few nice long-term clients.  Also take a look at Google Engage - there might be some collateral that you can use to demonstrate added value.

You'll also be out of work in a few years time when the big boys get their act together, unless you can demonstrate value above and beyond what clients can get for free if they do it themselves.

Yeah right.

Scoff you might.  I reckon that designers in the low-cost cottage industry are an endangered species, though.

Have you ever read Theodore Levitt's classic journal article Marketing Myopia?  It's 50 years old now, but still very relevant - Google will help you find it. The essence is that we have a tendency to get so bogged down in our technical superiority that we lose track of what the market needs.  It happened with all the great US industries in the 20th century; the railways went by the wayside not because people didn't need to travel anymore, but because they didn't see the airlines as competition.  Corner shops closed as supermarkets opened; town centre cinemas closed as television sets found themselves in people's living rooms.

The same will apply with cottage-industry web design.  The need for web sites will not abate.  But as companies realise that they can largely do it themselves with services such as GBBO (or site builders bundled with hosting packages, or hosted e-commerce services such as Shopify), small site builders will find increasingly little work.

Depressing?  Only if you have your head in the sand and don't do anything about it.  That's where the added-value bit comes in.  What can you provide above and beyond these free/cheap services, that the customer will pay for?

[suedenem]

Catch up - we bought a house and put down a £30k deposit

Hence the past tense 'had'

I know I'm underpaid. I know I will never really progress in the job I'm in. As I said in Dom's thread, this is of little importance to me *right now* because I am (relatively) happy with the situation.

That said, I have considered going freelance or something similar. I struggle with
a) the focus needed to make it work
b) the idea of being independent
c) how to market myself
d) where to begin
e) plucking up the courage to make such a massive change to my life with a child to (co-)support

And so on.

Self employment definitely isn't for everyone.  Keep yourself market-aware, though, and you'll be in a better position to make good decisions when you need to.

[Jem]

There's additional work involved in creating a 'static' site that you don't need to do when building a WP site. If you're used to building sites in WP then I can't see how it could possibly take almost twice as long to build the site. That's too much.

See, to me, it would justify the additional cost for the value the customer gets out of it. I agree I could probably knock up a WordPress site quicker than just a basic HTML one (depending on requirements, obviously) but the customer would be getting something more at the end.

But I don't have anything to do with the pricing here so I'm already out of my depth in this discussion, ha!

[Jem]

Self employment definitely isn't for everyone.

And I forgot f) convincing Karl that I wouldn't make us bankrupt in the process

[sarahA]

Sarah - if you're still reading - I'd be looking to take advantage of Google's 3 month Liverpool residency if I were you.  There's quite a bit of press about getting Liverpool businesses online; tap into that and you should get a few nice long-term clients.  Also take a look at Google Engage - there might be some collateral that you can use to demonstrate added value.

Cheers for the info, I'll have a look   Right now we're only just coping with the amount of work we have plus pushing out what we can to another person. We've got on board with a Liverpool marketing agency who said they were shopping around for WP developers but seem to have come to us for all of their quotes and we've quoted them full rates which are actually fairly competitive round here.

That said, I have considered going freelance or something similar. I struggle with
a) the focus needed to make it work
b) the idea of being independent
c) how to market myself
d) where to begin
e) plucking up the courage to make such a massive change to my life with a child to (co-)support

For where to begin, you need to get in touch with local agencies (marketing, design, even development) and just get your name down as a potential PHP/WP developer. Also get friendly with local businesses who may recommend you (photographers etc). Check out any free networking groups in the area and see if you can get to any of those, and just try and push your name. It'd be hard work to do that and work full time (unless you can maybe get a week holiday and spend the time pushing your services), but if you can build up a local network and ensure everyone knows who you are then it probably wouldn't take long before someone is prepared to give you some work and once a few happen, with your coding ability, I've no doubt more would come along soon after.

Also let further afield companies/designers etc know that you're after work as there's always jobs that maybe can't get fitted in or are urgent. For us, if someone wants something doing within a week, we just can't manage as we have a lot of ongoing work plus usually booked up for a month, but if we could knew there was someone with good coding skills to hire then we'd be happy to pass on work

Finally, if you can get in with a good ongoing contract or two then you have a safety net. This is the only reason we can continue as we do to be honest, and we've even considered looking into PGCEs or Masters to have a further qualification for teaching or a job in something else if we should need it (afterall, who knows where the web will be in 5-10 years?!)

[suedenem]

There's additional work involved in creating a 'static' site that you don't need to do when building a WP site. If you're used to building sites in WP then I can't see how it could possibly take almost twice as long to build the site. That's too much.

See, to me, it would justify the additional cost for the value the customer gets out of it. I agree I could probably knock up a WordPress site quicker than just a basic HTML one (depending on requirements, obviously) but the customer would be getting something more at the end.

But I don't have anything to do with the pricing here so I'm already out of my depth in this discussion, ha!

Sure, WP is a geek's paradise, and the customer is getting something more in terms of 'product', but our smaller customers never tend to update their sites so in essence they aren't getting any 'value' from a CMS.  In fact, we have to nag our clients to get them to realise that their sites need updates.  That's what I mean about being 'market aware' - what are your customers actually getting out of the service you provide?

Assuming that the customer has £x to spend, I'd suggest trialling a Google Adwords campaign, creating an email template in MailChimp or paying us for a day's consultancy over implementing a CMS most of the time.  After all, even we will only charge £25 to change a bit of text on a site!

[familychoice]

The same will apply with cottage-industry web design.  The need for web sites will not abate.  But as companies realise that they can largely do it themselves with services such as GBBO (or site builders bundled with hosting packages, or hosted e-commerce services such as Shopify), small site builders will find increasingly little work.

I doubt it, as I've often mentioned before on here most of my clients struggle to  switch on their PC's, and despite some of them attending a range of training courses instantly forget everything they've learned as soon as they get back home.

Some companies might be able to cope with Shopify and the like but most of my clients wouldn't know where to start, and wouldn't want to. The option for DIY site building has been around since the start, and the more features they add the more complicated it gets for punters.

Head in the sand? Maybe, but maybe I've heard it all before.

[vee]

Hi,

First an apology for not being around here much these days - fortunately our business is growing and I'm always pushed for time. So much these days that my partner has finally joined me after several years of threatening  

We did indeed identify a niche several years ago and continue to develop that. We now offer full marketing packages including blogs, copy writing, websites, mobile websites, print design, SEO etc etc. We still work from home but now have a video guy, graphic designer and coder who all work regularly for us. Now he's on board, David (partner) has helped me to push into areas in the same business niche where we didn't work before - this "one-stop-shop" approach is working really nicely and to be honest we've stolen a bit of a lead on our main competitors. The competition was well over priced and this has also helped - we have far fewer overheads than they do and the quality of our work and responsiveness is (apparently) a lot better so we've also been able to leverage off that. However, they are starting to up their game now they've realised what's going on, so we always have to keep pushing the standards and on the look out for nifty "value adds" for our punters.

Just on CMS and the like, we've tried all sorts and to be honest have reverted back to good old html with Perch plugged in to manage 2 or 3 pages where the punters want to update bits of text. Beyond that they neither have the time nor skill to make a page look good using an average CMS. The ones that tried just came back to us after balls'ing it up   We nearly always add a customised WP blog to the static site - but just for blogging. I wouldn't want our typical clients going anywhere near WordPress other than for adding blog articles (which we train them on). In the last couple of months we've also rescued three or four projects that had been built on poor CMS's which had cost the earth but the poor punters couldn't use. We just charge a sensible fee for updates which everyone seems happy with. So in summary our package tends to be a static site with Perch plugged in selectively, WP for blogging (set up to auto post to FB and Twitter) and MailChimp for promo emails. Backed up with some decent SEO, this gives our punters a nice web marketing package. Cost for that lot (15 page site) would be around £2.5 - £3k + monthly SEO fees on top. We're currently adding a couple of those per month to our client list plus the recurring income (approx 40% of turnover) for updates and the like. Our costs are very low - we deliberately decided to stay in the home office and use freelance guys rather than employ. So we won't ever be mega rich but for a home-based design business its quite nice. That and the comute to work is approximately 15 seconds! Another major benefit is that my partner is now a lot happier than when he worked for a bunch of corporate tossers who had zero respect for anyone - oh and 19% tax  

There were a couple of guys on here from a long while back that really helped me in the early days, Kev, PaulB, Sam, Gary etc plus, more recently, Charlie who does a lot of our copy writing. So if you're still around thanks folks. I'm not quite sure how well it would have gone if we hadn't identified a particular niche so maybe some good fortune there?

As for auto site builders, well these may suffice for some small local businesses (no disrespect to them) but we are fortunate that our client niche tends to want fairly nice bespoke stuff that's currently well outside the scope of the average site builder.

If anyone's interested, Dental Media (www.dental-media.co.uk) is the bulk of our work theses days with maybe 20% still coming from ecommerce via our old (sadly not up-to-date) Veedesign site.

Just my 5p's worth.
Vee

[Jem]

Sure, WP is a geek's paradise, and the customer is getting something more in terms of 'product', but our smaller customers never tend to update their sites so in essence they aren't getting any 'value' from a CMS.  In fact, we have to nag our clients to get them to realise that their sites need updates.  That's what I mean about being 'market aware' - what are your customers actually getting out of the service you provide?

I can only think of one client of ours from the past 4-5 years who've paid for a CMS (bespoke - way before WordPress was as good as it is now) and not bothered to use it... we update it as part of a retainer. I think the reason being, most of our clients (being the "low end" of the market: charities etc) can't afford to run the risk of not being able to update themselves.

[samhs]

The most important thing, above all else, is to charge a reasonable fee for your skills - that has to be dictated by the marketplace, of course, but what value can you bring to a business employing you?

We regularly win work where we're by no means the cheapest, and I'd say locally we're probably one of the most expensive options - but we try to sell on the basis of the quality and added-value we can bring to the table - invaluable for businesses (and therefore a worthwhile investment). Also, some of our competitors are technically so poor that although the customer can't always tell the difference, we can educate them and illustrate in very real tangible terms the differences, thus justifying the cost.

There's absolutely no point doing work for less money than you can reasonably sustain yourself with - you'll be miserable and broke. You might as well be broke, but spend your time doing something constructive instead!

[samhs]

Oh, and Vee - you've always been most welcome

[suedenem]

I doubt it, as I've often mentioned before on here most of my clients struggle to  switch on their PC's, and despite some of them attending a range of training courses instantly forget everything they've learned as soon as they get back home.

Some companies might be able to cope with Shopify and the like but most of my clients wouldn't know where to start, and wouldn't want to. The option for DIY site building has been around since the start, and the more features they add the more complicated it gets for punters.

Head in the sand? Maybe, but maybe I've heard it all before.

Two reasons why I think it'll be different in the next few years:

• Employees who have literally used computers since they were aged 4 are now coming on stream
• No site building service specifically targetted at small businesses has had the weight of the like of Google behind it before

Have you read Levitt's Marketing Myopia?.  It's worth it, even if you disagree with him.  He kick-started marketing as business orientation.  All the good work you do for your clients will probably have been indirectly influenced by his thinking; it would be ironic if you thought the market you current have won't be taken over by something more appropriate to your clients.

[suedenem]

Hi

Hello - I don't think I've ever posted in reply to you before (long time lurker, now occasional poster).  My apologies for rehashing bits of old threads, btw, but your story always stuck out as a good case study of knowing your market :-)

Completely agree about limiting what content clients can edit.  In terms of CMSs, we normally only provide an editable news section (in-house script; WP is usually overkill even for this for most clients).  The only exceptions are a few corporate accounts as they have their own marketing departments who have the in-house skills, a few local businesses that we did low cost sites for (no budget for anything but WP install + theme), and a couple of clients who republish their newspaper columns.

Re: Perch, have you tried Unify?  Self-hosted and works in a similar way to Perch (HTML comments for editable areas), with a very intuitive admin interface.

[Mr Anderson]

Interesting thread. We usually try to target the offering to what's really needed, with static sites sold to clients who say they don't want/need updates to be made, by themselves or us. We do often get clients who are insistent on being able to make updates themselves, so get a CMS thrown in for them to use, but in a number of cases we've later been hired to revert a CMS site to a static one (notably when they realise that a CMS has to be maintained even if not used).

We even have one client who has had an ongoing contract for updates with us who last year decided they needed to be able to do the updating themselves. So along with the much needed design revamp that we'd been trying to encourage them to invest in they asked for a CMS. For what they wanted WP fit the bill perfectly and we gave them a heavily modded WP (custom plugins, functions, widgets & post types etc) site with a forum bolted on. The idea was they'd be able to save money by not having to pay us for the minor updates. This all cost a few thousand pounds, they were give three comprehensive user guides written by me which guided the different board members and business office users through the features they had access to/responsibility for (in person training was out of the question as the users were spread through the UK, Western Europe and parts of the Middle East). Every button click was described in detail, taking them through every process from start to finish, and several of them proved to be able to carry out their roles pretty quickly. However within a couple of months one group of them began sending updates through for us to do. This was then quickly followed by members of the other two user groups. So we now still do their updates (the support contract was always kept in place anyway), but get to do it from within WP instead of having to edit static pages (most of which were someone else's DW exported tabular markup). So their investment ultimately was just in making our life easier - it does however mean that we can do updates quicker, but not by a massive amount.
 
So it's not always possible to sell a client what they need, when what they want takes over. The main thing for us is that they're happy with their sites and they achieve what they want as far as the visitor experience is concerned.