MS#1 - am I going to need a CMS?

I wouldn't advise Wordpress as a cms it can be used that way but takes some work and experience; having said that there is something known as Wordpress lite ? iirc that greatly simplifies the admin to functioning better as a basic cms.

My advice would be to try something like
http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/

which is pretty easy to get to grips with, but be warned there is extra work involved in all this so stress that fact don't allow it to be thought that this can be thrown together overnight.

Yes, my feeling from what I read was that it was stretching things to make WP a CMS - MS is never going to be a blog.

I hoped you'd have another little favourite to recommend, I shall go and check it out. I was really trying to get away from Deb ever having to do the updates - I don't think she particularly wants to and would be happy for me to do them. However just to be safe I think I'll suss it out.

I think I can see down the track that this is going to be bigger than Ben Hur so I will need CMS Made Simple.

I haven't looked too deeply yet but I get the impression I could keep going with my HTML pages and then apply the CMS to it to make it into "templates" for the site later. Am I on the right track? Or would it be better to stop after the menu is sorted and get the CMS going?

With most CMSs, you should be able to complete you whole site as static HTML to start with if you want to do it that way and then simply take site-wide pieces of the HTML to add to templates and then take the individual content parts of each page and add them to CMS entries.

You might actually want to look at http://www.cushycms.com/ which doesn't require much in set-up - all you need to do is add a class to elements you want to be editable.

Hello Tyssen

Thanks for confirming that. I had a horrid feeling I might have to start over again!

I will check out cushycms too. One thing though, when you give the user access to change/add info, is it possible to make the editing available to just content of an element? In other words, no ability to restyle. You can tell I've never seen one in action but that is essentially what I'm looking for.

Just took a quick look and it does indeed look soooo simple - and just class tags sounds great

Wooohoooo!!! It is indeed light and simple. Just like my lovely little FireFTP.

I've just watched the video, and even with the pic and sound out of sych I could follow and it answered my question about content/styles.

I love the fact that it's hosted and there's no app to install. It was a bit scary when Deb wanted to make a change to the bakehouse and I couldn't access her server - had to talk her through Notepad edit, installing FireFTP and uploading the changed file over the phone. Not something I want to keep doing

So I've already added the bakehouse :thumbsup: Puurrrrfick.