I have a friend who recently came to me asking how she could edit her website on her own.  Obviously, if her site was built with a content management system (CMS) this would not be an issue.  Her site was built with no back end for client modifications so in order to edit anything you would have to go in to the html files (for me this is no problem but for the client this can be a complete mess) and edit around code.  Building her a new website was not an option due to time and budget constraints so I needed a quick CMS fix.

I remembered a while back that I had found a tool called CushyCMS that would allow you to easily implement content management in to any straight coded site.   In this case I was able to make every 5 or 6 of her web pages fully editable (content and images) in a matter of 15 or 20 minutes…this included setup of CushyCMS and everything.  It’s so simple…all you need to do is place a css class of “cushycms” on any element you would like to edit and Cushy CMS takes care of the rest.

For example:

<h1 class="cushycms" title="My Heading">THIS IS MY EDITABLE HEADING</h1> 
<div class="cushycms" title="My Main Content"><p>MORE EDITABLE STUFF FOR YOU OR YOUR CLIENT</p></div>
<img src="MyPhoto.jpg" class="cushycms" width="250" height="100" alt="MyPhoto" />

After you add these div tags you would go in to the CushyCMS Control Panel and add the page to that particular site and voila!   You now have a web page that your client can edit without messing with code.

For any web designer that still prefers not to use a content management system like Joomla, Drupal, or Word Press to name a few, CushyCMS is a wonderful option.  You can build a quick html/css layout for a client and add CMS to it in a matter of minutes.  The best part of Cushy CMS is that you can use it for free!  The free version is sufficient for most applications but I can see where the Pro version would be very helpful especially if you need support on the product (I think the pricing on the pro version is more than reasonable).  I am using the free version with great success and I would highly recommend this to anyone looking for a quick CMS fix on virtually any website.  For more information, go to CushyCMS.com and check it out!

Side note: I am not a paid CushyCMS representative nor do I get an affiliate commission if you sign up.  I am simply a happy user of CushyCMS! If you have any questions about CushyCMS please feel to email me or leave a comment.