Does your personal site, web devstories, girlfriends site need a taxonomic structure that spans ~7 levels? Its all very well giving those examples if they are relevant to my needs....below are some relevant examples:

http://www.carabusonline.co.uk/ - Drupal

http://bugguide.net/ - Drupal

I could probably find more but theres no point really.

Right, Ive never looked into costs of paying someone to design a site before, so know nothing of the costs etc.  I know that doing things on the cheap can end up with results that are worse than if you did it yourself.

I want to put together a site like http://www.eol.org or http://www.carabusonline.co.uk, but covering pretty much all microscopic life in the British Isles, well, microscope photos of them.

I knocked this up earlier in the year:

http://www.microphoto.co.uk/

The system I came up with using Drupal isnt the most efficient, and it doesnt look as good as carabusonline. Im pretty sure they use drupal too.

Im curious whether it would cost a lot of money to pay a designer to use Drupal to come up with an easy and efficient website for adding photos. £100? £250? £500? £1000? If it was commercial and ultimately made money through sponsorship and/or advertising, would they want a cut of the profits?

Price really ranges accross developers and their abilities.

Im really not aware of that many developers that dont offer a CMS system, only really one man bands that create stuff and throw it up on 1and1.  Any decent team of developers would have built there own CMS for their clients to logon to and make changes on the fly.  The days of calling up the web host and being charged to make an alteration to content should be long gone.  

Last bit is not true. Lots of control but there is aways a limit. Good designers and developers do as much as possible and build things so that they come out consistently on the website. We give clients control but we also make sure they can not screw up a site lots. If related pages come out differently then we have done a bad job and we go as far as limiting the WYSIWYG to solve that.

Any client who has moaned and pestered for more control has thus broke their site and then come moaning after. They do not go "we messed it up, can you help us please" , its their fault and they blame you quite often.

But yeah, there is a point where if they want things done and its a template change for example you as a developer need to be doing it. Content - Yes, they can, but not everything.

This.

In my work our clients generally have far too much control because our CMS is so powerful even with most of the modules switched off, you have to set boundaries and usually even take is so far as to simplify the admin system for clients you know will not be capable of using certain features. The number of times we have had a support request that has cost me development time on another site because a client has done something stupid or made a hash of their site is uncountable. We charge per hour for my time when someone does this.

There are also many occasions where a client will want something a bit more bespoke than CMS functionality will provide such as installation of a jQuery based carousel or gallery, or a piece of flash, or configuration of Google Analytics, etc. All these are extras that potentially need to be charged for to install on someones website that a CMS may not cover.

Unfortunately most clients are not computer experts, let alone webmasters. Expecting anything from them beyond the ability to use TinyMCE or another WYSIWYG editor for adding content can be dangerous.

Theres no chance that would ever happen as the company has invested too much time, money and training into our current platform.

doesnt amazon webservices offer something similar?

Quote from: Cypher

Quote from: zpyder

Right, Ive never looked into costs of paying someone to design a site before, so know nothing of the costs etc.  I know that doing things on the cheap can end up with results that are worse than if you did it yourself.

I want to put together a site like http://www.eol.org or http://www.carabusonline.co.uk, but covering pretty much all microscopic life in the British Isles, well, microscope photos of them.

I knocked this up earlier in the year:

http://www.microphoto.co.uk/

The system I came up with using Drupal isnt the most efficient, and it doesnt look as good as carabusonline. Im pretty sure they use drupal too.

Im curious whether it would cost a lot of money to pay a designer to use Drupal to come up with an easy and efficient website for adding photos. £100? £250? £500? £1000? If it was commercial and ultimately made money through sponsorship and/or advertising, would they want a cut of the profits?

Price really ranges accross developers and their abilities.

Im really not aware of that many developers that dont offer a CMS system, only really one man bands that create stuff and throw it up on 1and1.  Any decent team of developers would have built there own CMS for their clients to logon to and make changes on the fly.  The days of calling up the web host and being charged to make an alteration to content should be long gone.  

Last bit is not true. Lots of control but there is aways a limit. Good designers and developers do as much as possible and build things so that they come out consistently on the website. We give clients control but we also make sure they can not screw up a site lots. If related pages come out differently then we have done a bad job and we go as far as limiting the WYSIWYG to solve that.

Any client who has moaned and pestered for more control has thus broke their site and then come moaning after. They do not go "we messed it up, can you help us please" , its their fault and they blame you quite often.

But yeah, there is a point where if they want things done and its a template change for example you as a developer need to be doing it. Content - Yes, they can, but not everything.

Well that really is a company client relationship issue, not a issue of technology or development.  You should have a clear business model where a project manager works with the clients between the developers and clients for even the smallest changes.

As Nige points out not all, not all clients are that bright even with the most simple CMS be it a blog RSS, a ecomerce system with POS etc etc, so its down to you to make it clear whos responsibility is what.