Although you’d never know it from the tourists still thronging the Boston Common and Harvard Square, summer is, quickly, starting to wind down here in New England.

It’s been a busy one at TintypesDigital, and it’s also had a consistent theme: everyone seems to be lining up to build a new website these days, or for doing a makeover of an old one. It started back in May, with our rebuild of the East of Shirley band website, a site admittedly near and dear to our hearts. A fairly ambitious e-commerce site was proposed for a potential client in June, but this was then back-burnered due to the slowing retail economy. That was followed, in quick succession, by requests for 5 or 6 new site implementations over the space of the next month or so, two of them from serious bloggers (and very talented writers), several art/design portfolio sites, and some good old-fashioned small business frameworks. We’ve had additional queries since that could turn into real work somewhere down the line. The phone, even in this challenging economic climate, is ringing.

A common theme has emerged as we’ve dug into these clients’ requirements: in each case, the customer wanted to be able to maintain the new or revamped site substantially on their own.  They needed help, both technical and in the design department, getting their projects off the ground, but once running, they wanted to hold the keys.

This, of course, is an old refrain in the web development world – especially when it comes to smaller, highly budget-conscious, lower-margin businesses. It’s very much an understandable impulse. But meeting this requirement hasn’t always been easy. The technical obstacles to real “self-management” are often daunting. In recent years, however, with the emergence of “CMS,” or “content management systems,” such as WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla, the tools and frameworks that enable effective client management have clearly continued to evolve and improve. It feels like we are now indeed at an inflection point in this regard.  Smart, stylish, content-rich sites really can be produced now that allow for a very high degree of “self-maintenance.”

We view this as a positive development, and not only for our customers. Clients who are more engaged in the actual day-to-day management of their site(s), whether it’s by posting regular updates to their blog pages, or by creatively exploring the myriad possibilities for leveraging social media in conjunction with their online presence – these are clients who more often have active, “living” sites. They’re clients who have moved beyond the old, static paradigm of “Web 1.0″ pages, which oftentimes suffered from stale, out-dated content.

The new approach isn’t for everyone. For sites requiring a maximum degree of design flexibility, CMS frameworks can sometimes get in the way, or at least complicate the site significantly from a coding perspective. And for some clients, particularly those less comfortable with chores that have a technical dimension, self-maintenance is more of a burden than a liberator.

Still, this new model for website construction and management is catching on for a reason: clients understandably are looking for ways to lower costs, while increasing their independent capabilities.

The new web is a more dynamic, exciting place. To the uninitiated, it can indeed be as complex and as confusing as ever. That’s where we come in. We’re here to help clients move their enterprises forward, by developing the web presence necessary to allow them to put forward their best ideas, whether it’s business content or intellectual capital, for the world to see.

As the summer draws to a close, and the streets of Boston and Cambridge become filled once again with the sounds of students’ voices, we expect this new way of doing web work will really begin to take hold. We hope so. In our view, it continues to provide a compelling business proposition for smaller, budget-conscious clients – or for anyone who simply wants to take control of their platform, and needs some help getting there.

So, give us a shout. We’re here all seasons, no matter the weather.  And our rates are definitely easier to take than those college tuition bills that might be sitting on your table right now.

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