Anyone whose been involved in web development—as a one-man shop or as part of a team—knows that once the site is built and online, one of the biggest headaches comes from clients who want updates. Especially the high-maintenance clients who want nit-picky changes and constant content changes.

To lessen or eliminate these woes, thoughtbot, inc. created Widgetfinger.com as a site editor and maintenance package that is beyond what you normally get with those host-it-yourself server plug-ins you’re probably used to seeing. Widgetfinger doesn’t just manage websites, but also gives you full control over your leased or hosted servers (if you have them) and more. All for only $10/site.

A site that has a domain outside of your setup (isn’t a “testing” site on widgetfinger.com) is considered active and incurs the charge. This means you don’t pay for the widgetfinger service while you’re developing the site or learning to use the widgetfinger software. Once the site is active, you (and your client) gain the ability to do several things.

First, you can update the site’s text and information easily, on the fly, through the easy WYSIWYG interface. You also get bandwidth, disk space, and other monitoring tools plus server log analytics for statistics tracking. Email configuration and hosting is also there as part of the monthly fee.

The widgetfinger website is easy to navigate and their tools are great for the small to medium-sized shops that can’t afford a full-time server team and back-end software manager. This package includes a lot of great tools for a reasonable price.

The only concern here is limited usability for site updates. If the page is beyond the usual “online brochure,” the editor won’t handle it very well (if at all). That said, the WYSIWYG is basically an editable Web-browser, so you are really looking at what it will look like online. Luckily, you can test widgetfinger for free without paying anything, so you can easily find out if this solution is right for your shop.

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