I am designing a site, but my client wants to edit it

[irishlass25]

I am a graphic design student, about to design my first professional website for a client (free of charge). He wants elements of it to be designed in flash, but wants to be able to edit the site for himself after it's finished. Trouble is he himself is not familiar with flash...that's a problem, right??

Does anyone have suggestions for a newbie on how to work with a client in this situation? If he were actually paying me to design the site, would it be normal for him to just expect that I would maintain the site forever in the future, for a fee any time work is done? How does that work?

Thanks!!

 

[bcee]

I would suggest since you are doing it for free you can leave the client to update the site. Unless you want to spend double the time building a custom PHP CMS that outputs XML for Flash to parse.

 

[CT-Matt]

Why not design those elements in Flash, and leave the "regular" content there for him to edit? The whole website doesn't necessarily have to be in Flash.

 

[LouTheDesigner]

I think the main, and rather professional question, you should ask him is "Why do you want it done in Flash?" Allow him to make his points, since good salesmen always listen to the customer, but then offer counterpoints regarding why it should be done in HTML5 with some jquery. Tell him about how the site won't show up on an iPhone (that might scare them right our of their Flash shoes).

Depending on how good you are with AS3, you can do this (I've done it for 2 clients).. I showed them how to use an FTP client, and I had all the images load through an XML file, which I showed them how to manipulate.

-Lou