Who edits your website after launch?
Most websites change hands the day they go live. Choosing how your team will update it matters as much as how it looks.
Launch day is when a website stops being a project and becomes part of how a business runs. Someone has to add the new product, fix a price or post next month's event. Too often that someone is a developer on a retainer, because nobody planned for anyone else to do it.
So before we design a page, we ask who will be changing it, how often and what they'll change. The answer decides how the site gets built.
Three kinds of content
Almost everything on a business website falls into one of three groups:
- Pages that rarely change, like the home page, services and about. These are designed once and refined now and then.
- Collections that grow, like listings, team members, case studies, events or posts. Each new item follows the same shape.
- Data that moves every day, like stock levels, bookings or orders. This usually lives in another system already.
The first group needs good design. The second needs a simple way to add items. The third needs a connection to the system where the data already lives, not another copy of it.
Picking the right editor
For the collections, there's a spectrum of tools. Here is how we choose:
| If your team… | We usually reach for |
|---|---|
| Adds a few items a month and wants nothing new to learn | A form-based editor that saves straight into the site |
| Publishes often, with lots of images and several editors | A headless CMS such as Sanity |
| Already lives in spreadsheets | Airtable or a similar tool, read when the site is built |
The first option is what this blog runs on. Each post is a plain text file kept with the site's code. Writing one is like filling in a form, and publishing it rebuilds the site in under a minute. There is no database to secure and no monthly fee.
The best editor is the one your team will still be using a year from now.
What to watch for
A few things decide whether a setup holds up once the launch excitement fades:
- Images. Some tools, Airtable and Notion among them, give out image links that expire after a few hours. A site that loads them directly breaks without warning, so we copy images across when the site is built.
- Seats. Per-user pricing adds up when five people need to fix a typo now and then.
- Previews. Editors should see a change before it goes live. Ours open a private preview link for every draft.
- Ownership. Your content should be exportable in a plain format. If the tool disappears, the words and pictures shouldn't go with it.
The short version
Decide who edits what before choosing a platform. Keep the pages that rarely change in code, give growing collections a simple editor, and connect live data where it already lives.
If you're planning a site and want to talk through how your team will run it, get in touch. We're happy to help you think it through.
