In the 8+ years I’ve been in the web consulting biz, there’s one request I’ve heard over and over: “We just want to be able to edit everything on the site ourselves.”

Do you, now?

The Web isn’t Microsoft Word or even PowerPoint (and I’m sure you’ve seen your share of mangled PowerPoint presentations). If we turned you loose on your own site with next to no knowledge of HTML, what would your site look like in a week? You hired someone to design it and lay it out, right? Why would you want to go back and undo all that hard work?

Yes, there’s a need for the client to have some control over the content of the site. But that control is not easy to build. A custom site requires a custom CMS. For every sexy design feature, you lose content flexibility.

I racked my brain for a way to explain this to the latest client, and finally came up with the following idea. It’s so obvious that I’m probably the last person in this line of work to figure it out.

A typical business site is a billboard. Or an ad. Or a brochure. (We don’t call them “brochureware” for nothing.) You don’t see businesses changing their billboards or radio ads every couple of weeks. Those things cost money and take time to create. How do those businesses deliver up-to-date content to current and prospective customers? They use a newsletter.

What’s the new media equivalent of a newsletter? You’re looking at it.

Newsletters have a set format and delivery schedule, and there’s a per-unit cost. A blog delivers content to as many readers as you want, as often as you want, for free (not counting hosting costs). Most blogging software allows you to create whole pages as well, so you’re not stuck with the post-a-few-lines-about-your-cat format.

Why aren’t more companies buying into this? Maybe because you, Mr. Web Professional, haven’t clued them in to the business benefits of blogging. They (and perhaps you, too) see it as a fad that has nothing to do with the business world. Sure, some corporations are tinkering with blogs, but that’s just a cheap marketing trick, right? Well, it could save you some serious headaches as a consultant.

Try this. Tell your client that you’ll scope and build a fancy custom CMS for their fancy custom site. Then, almost as an afterthought, show them the Typo or WordPress blog that it took you thirty minutes to set up. Tell them they can use that as an interim content-management solution until you get the “real” CMS done. They’ll thank you for giving them a whole new marketing channel, and send you more interesting and useful work.

And they’ll forget all about the fancy custom CMS — the one that never gets finished and no one is satisfied with anyway.

I mentioned a post or two back that I was trying to kick off a freelance copywriting venture. In my line of work, if you don’t have a web site, you don’t have a business. With that in mind, allow myself to introduce myself The Copyhacker.

I’m hunting for web sites with ghastly copy. There’s no shortage of them around here. When I find one, someone at that place of business is getting an email, and said site is going up on the Hit List.

Want to help? Let me know of any sites you come across that could use a good Copyhacking. Together we can rid this town of bad writing.

I even have a badge for you to wear with pride. Just link it to copyhacker.com and send some biz my way.

[edit] A big overdue thanks to Bryan for hours of exceptional work on logo, layout and spoon-feeding me CSS.

…thanks to Seth Godin (I told you I want this guy’s job, right?):

If you talked to people the way [businesses] talked to [consumers], they’d punch you in the face. (Hugh MacLeod)

I know what I want to be. I want to be a writer.

I don’t know what I want to do.

Goals notwithstanding, I just can’t see my writing career putting food on the table until I’ve cranked out that first bestseller. I’d love to be a star blogger like Godin, Kawasaki or Gruber, have netizens hanging on my every word, and get book deals dropped in my lap every day. I don’t know how to get there from here, though. I can crank out web copy. I haven’t done much of it, but I know I can. Could I do it several hours a day, every day?

Do I want to?

I’ve had a great time playing with Rails for the last couple of months, and doing a little freelance web consulting. I can’t see that bringing home the bacon, either. Not for long. This pond is too small, and there are a lot of fish in it already. I’m probably the only fish in the pond that knows Rails — but I’m not sure how that translates into a competitive edge when most people think this stuff can’t be that hard (after all, everyone’s nephew knows HTML) and are reluctant to spend much.

I wanted to do a little copywriting, a little development, and a little creative writing, and have the first two subsidize the third. I suppose that could still happen. I haven’t gotten my planned copywriting venture off the ground yet. There may be a little water down that hole.

I have no immediate prospects for my next paycheck, and that’s giving me the willies. I’m sure every newbie freelancer goes through that. The question, though, is what do I do about it?

Eventually I’d like to spend my days either 1) writing fiction or 2) surfing the Interweb and writing about the cool stuff I find. How does one get to that point? I hoped that breaking out of the cubicle prison would give me the time to make money with one hand and develop my creative second career with the other. Was that naive? If I returned to full-time employment, would it advance my goals faster? Or have I just not worked hard enough yet at my own business?

Do any freelancers out there — web, writer, or otherwise — have thoughts (besides ‘cut the navelgazing already’)?

I expect responses to fall into two categories: right brain (”Go for your dreams! (= You can do anything! (=”) and left (”Suck it up. Get a job. Everyone else has to.”). Let’s dig a little deeper than that, huh?

Two items in my daily “gold” news feed that caught my eye:

• Say “No” to Average (Seth’s Blog)
  In which Seth Godin talks about working the edge of a market instead of the middle. Turning down the average requests, focusing on the unique and spectacular.
  

  “By turning down the average stuff and insisting on standing for something on the edge, he profits…. It’s really scary to turn down most (the average) of what comes your way and hold out for the remarkable opportunities.”

• Initiative (Daring Fireball)
  In which John Gruber decides to quit his day job and focus on making his blog the best it can be.
  He references a Steve Jobs quote:

  “Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work… keep looking, and don’t settle.”

I don’t know if Godin and Gruber are coordinating with each other, but when two of my e-roes say the same thing on the same day, I listen.

Last Wednesday was my wife’s birthday. She asked for a pair of white rocking chairs for the porch. Newly-minted househusband that I am, I hauled two big boxes home from Wal-Mart and spent ten minutes assembling two nice new rocking chairs.

This was followed by twenty minutes scraping the gooey residue of several “this end up” stickers off said chairs. (I know, lighter fluid would’ve dissolved it right away.) Yesterday, Signal vs. Noise confirmed what I knew in my heart: whoever produced these chairs cares not a whit for the butts that sit in them.

This week, the Startup Junkie gripes about missing the holiday covered dish lunch. It ought to put you in the holiday mood.

Got any funny stories (or horror stories) about your office party? Post them here as comments or email them to colaspot@colaspot.com. If we use yours there, I’ll see to it that you get a comment invite.

Now that you know something about The Business Experiment, I can tell you how exactly I’m involved in it. I’m spending time this evening editing the third issue of AnswerSpace — the TBE newsletter. I read the first one, thought the quality was lacking, and offered my services to the team leader. She read the previous post and accepted my offer. I had a blast editing issue 2. This week, I contributed an article in addition to my editing duties.

It’s not professional work in the monetary sense. They’re not paying me for it. But if I put enough material in front of the right eyeballs, it will eventually pay off in cash. I have to do my share of volunteer work before anyone will believe that I deserve to get paid for this.

This blog has laid the foundation for everything else to come. Without it, I wouldn’t be in a position to do this. So thanks, readers, for all your help.

I realized that Thursday’s post was right up the Startup Junkie’s ball of tea, so I shamelessly reused it. Skip over to Colaspot anyway; there’s plenty of stuff there worth reading.

My work day got off to a perfect start when I pulled into the parking garage. A quickly-printed sign was taped to the card reader. It read something like this:

Please do not drive the wrong way down the garage ramp. The ramp is for driving up and for parking. People have complained and there have been several near accidents.

This particular garage’s floors are laid out in the form of a bisected square. Looking at it from above, the left, top, and bottom sides of the square are flat. The right side is the down ramp, and the middle side (!) is the up ramp.

The traffic flow for going up is as follows:

• drive up the middle
• take a sharp left
• drive along the left side
• take another sharp left
• repeat until you reach your floor

(Most of my cow-orkers and I have been banished to the top floor, but that’s a subject for another post.)

At the end of the day, here’s what you do instead:

• drive along one side of the square
• drive along another side of the square
• drive along another side of the square
• finally drive down the “down” side of the square
• repeat until dizziness and impatience make you crash into something

If you followed all that, you may have an idea why someone felt it necessary to write the note. See, at the end of the day, leaving the top floor, tired and hungry, the last thing you want to do is drive around and around in circles, only going down one-fourth of the time. So you cheat.

You go down the down ramp, make a sharp left, go down the up ramp, make another sharp left, and go down the next down ramp. Et voila: you’ve just dropped three floors in less time than it would take to go down one floor the proper way. It’s late, the garage is over half empty, no one is coming up, and no one parks on the upper floors anyway, except us few poor sods. They keep the rates too high, so the garage is never more than two-thirds full.

The urban geniuses that laid out the garage ignored one crucial thing: people are in a hurry at the end of the day. They’re out of patience. They want to get home and see their families and eat. Yet the proper procedure forces you to take the long way down when you least want to.

It would have been so easy to lay out the flow the other way, so that going up was longer than going down. In a perfect world, they would have installed electronic direction arrows at the corners of each floor, so that up was shortest in the morning and down was shortest in the afternoon. The main thoroughfares to the Charlotte Coliseum (and probably a lot of arenas in larger cities) do just that. Each lane has a programmable traffic light above it, so that lanes can switch directions as conditions dictate. Yes, I know that would cost an arm and a leg. OK, so how about at least using signs that say “turn this way before noon and that way after noon”? Trust our intelligence a little, and most importantly, make it look like you care.

You might say that would invite chaos, and that people would just ignore the signs. Isn’t that what’s happening anyway? I talked to a cow-orker on his way out this evening. He ignored the memo and took the short way down. I can’t say I blame him. When businesses make policy that ignores their customers’ (or employees’, for that matter) needs and wants, rebellion ensues.