One of my clients often changes the wordings and other information of a particular section of the website. He doesn’t like dabbling with the source code.
Since the website is managed with WordPress and that section is built through a highly customized template, there is a great chance he can crash the website if he edits the template through the dashboard. And if that happens, he’s staring at lost revenue because it’s this section that makes him money. Then he’ll have to wait for me to fix it.
This is not unusual. A lot of WordPress sites end up this way once a section is customized enough to stop looking like WordPress at all, and the pages that could be easily managed through the default WordPress editor can no longer be edited in such a straightforward manner.
Editing WordPress Content Without Touching the Template
So I developed a feature that if he is logged into his WordPress dashboard, he can edit that portion of the web page just like he can edit a Word document. If you have worked in WordPress, you may know that if you are logged into your admin account, even when you are visiting a normal web page of your WordPress-managed website, there is a black bar at the top with all the basic dashboard functions. This shows that you are logged in and can make changes. He just clicks where he wants to make the changes, makes the changes, and that’s it. The changes are saved.
And that’s really all it took. No separate login screen, no extra plugin for him to learn, nothing that looked different from browsing his own website. He just needed the one thing he was already doing, staying logged in, to also let him edit.
The Request I Said No To
While having a conversation recently, he wanted a similar feature to edit another part of the website. This is something that he rarely changes, maybe once in a couple of years and even longer. That information is hardcoded into the template.
I told him it would be an overkill. Building an interface for something he touches once every few years means more code sitting on the site. For such a change he could just email me and I’d make in five minutes.
I follow this approach with all the projects I work on. I don’t write code unnecessarily even if it gives me more billable hours. My focus is always to make the website more meaningful and more user-friendly instead of bloating it with superfluous feature code.
How often something changes decides whether it gets a dashboard feature, or stays a message to me.