Do you wish there was a way to make content management easier? Simple content creation and editing for your WordPress clients could save you hours every day!
Do you design amazing websites for your clients?
You already know a great website is updated regularly. But are your clients comfortable updating the content on their own sites?
In a world filled to bursting with smart devices and new tech, it's easy to underestimate how daunting content management can seem.
Formidable Forms makes content management so simple even your Grandma could do it. Your website pages and posts can all be managed from the front-end. That's right - users can edit their content and add new content without ever seeing the WordPress dashboard!
Why make content management easy?
I've a long background in web design, so this is a subject that is close to my heart. The core issue with content management is time.
When you manage a single website, time isn't usually an issue. But when you have hundreds of clients, and you are solely responsible for content updates on all their websites, this takes up a significant portion of your working week! This is an issue I experienced personally when I first started out as a web designer.
Before WordPress, my clients needed a copy of Dreamweaver and a basic understanding of HTML if they wanted to update their own website. Most clients had neither the software, nor the expertise. This meant me undertaking lots of time consuming edits, often breaking away from my current project to get them done.
When I discovered WordPress, I immediately recognized a huge benefit. My clients could log in and make their own edits and cut hours off my workload every week. Unfortunately, this didn't pan out straight away. My clients didn't think WordPress was as user-friendly as I did!
Then, page builder plugins like Cornerstone and Visual Composer came along. These made content management even easier again! But even with this additional level of user-friendliness, many of my clients were not convinced. I tried writing tutorials, and recording screengrab video guides to show the whole process step-by-step. But uptake was still glacial.
The bottom line was simple: many of my clients don't like the WordPress dashboard. Anything involving the back-end of the website is overwhelming and scary.
The solution: Content creation with simple WordPress forms
My very first project using Formidable involved creating WordPress posts from form entries. Once I'd discovered the power of that system, I knew this could be the solution I'd been looking for.
Entire posts and pages were generated from a simple form. Photos were uploaded and even galleries. I setup layouts and formatting so that everything looked professionally designed. All my clients had to do was submit a form!
I tried it out and was pleasantly surprised. My clients liked this system and actually used it!
Initially, I used this system so users could add simple blog posts. Then using custom post types, I discovered that portfolio items, testimonials, team profiles and much more could be added in the same way.
Editing content created via WordPress forms
If your content is created via forms, it is a "must-have" to allow users to easily edit this content. Thankfully Formidable has amazing front-end editing features!
A list of all created content can be displayed in a simple View. An edit link next to each item allows the user to go to that entry with a single click and update it.
This View can also be filtered by user. So if you have multiple content creators on your site, each will only be able to edit their own entries.
What about content that was created before Formidable was setup? Create form entries from existing posts to make them editable via your form!
Front-end content management for the win
Discovering this feature was a game changer, and one of the reasons I initially fell in love with Formidable. My clients now have a content management system they don't find overwhelming and changed my working day for the better. It made a massive difference in how I manage my workflow and freed up valuable time.
It also had a direct impact on customer satisfaction. Frustrated complaints about the complexity of the WordPress back-end were gone. My clients finally felt confident adding to and editing their own website content.
Do you have clients who struggle adding new content and making edits? Make content management easy with the best WordPress form builder plugin anywhere.
This seems great for editing basic text, but a paragraph field is very limited compared to the back-end post editor.
How can users insert things like bullet lists and headers without knowing HTML?
Have you seen the "Rich Text" field included in Formidable Pro?
More info here: https://formidableforms.com/knowledgebase/rich-text/
Thx Nathanael for the interesting post!
I would like to ask you same questions:
1) Do you prepare a kinda special page for your customers (known only to them) in which they can post their content or do you allow/make them to register or login before?
2) In the second case, how do you handle, practically, the possibility that the user accesses the admin area?
Thanks, Andy
Hi Andy,
I found the simplest way was to put the forms on a password protected page and the clients could only access these - access to the dashboard often wasn't required at all by my clients.