Many clients come to me and want the ability to update all or some of the pages of the site on their own. Sometimes they may have changing prices, new sales events and specials, they want to display different ads in different seasons or they just want to have that sense of control over their site text.
Many tools are available on the market today for what are called Content Management Systems or CMS.
One method I use is to create a ‘backdoor’ for a client with a listing of pages. Each page has a content box and that content box is where text edits can be done. They hit ‘Update’, the data is sent to a database and then the site updated on the front end.
Another option is to purchase a copy of Contribute, a product by Adobe (formerly Macromedia). Contribute connects to your web server, where the files are stored, and lets you edit the content of the site pages using a nice GUI editor, similar to Microsoft Word.
These are just two examples, but I know there are many other type systems on the market today. If you are a web developer and know of another CMS system, please feel free to share your ideas here on this forum.