Editing a website is one of the most common tasks any digital professional may encounter in their daily life, and yet, it’s a very difficult task more often than not. After all – you’re a marketer, not a developer!
You don’t know anything related to code and the mere sight of a black screen filled with white letters up to the top makes you anxious when all you want is to make some quick changes to a website! Maybe it’s just adjusting some text, trying out different pictures on a landing page or testing different colors for CTA buttons. You shouldn’t need to learn to code to perform such easy tasks – it shouldn’t be that difficult!
Relax, we’ve all been there.
Today you’ll learn a number of different methods to edit any webpage, whether it belongs to you or not. Grab a coffee and get ready for some nifty, awesome tricks for editing websites!
How to edit a website
What does editing a website mean?
It depends who you ask – and what parts of the website you want to change.
In general, we can differentiate between different elements of a website:
- Edit the website structure: This means major modifications, such as moving elements around, deleting elements and overall altering the website structure so that it becomes an entirely new web page. This could mean a lot of work, depending on the depth of the changes and the system used to build the web page.
- Edit website pictures: One easy kind of website editing is editing just pictures, that is: editing a website background images and replacing website images for new ones. This can be done with the goal of testing different styles or pictures, to play with the look and feel or to completely replace images inside a website. Generally, this is a job that doesn’t need much work and could be performed within minutes.
- Edit website texts: Editing a web page’s texts and writing website copy is one of the most common tasks when editing websites. The message you convey to your potential customers and clients is really important, so you better have an easy way for editing the text within your site so you can find the best sentence for each use case.
- Edit website colors: This could mean anything from changing the color of links to changing the colors of your buttons and main call to actions. It has been proven that some colors work better than others when writing compelling proposals so this is an important part of editing a website!
- Edit a website design: A website’s design conveys multiple things. Generally speaking, we’re talking about the overall layout, but most importantly the look and feel, color scheme and user experience of the page. Changes in design often mean major restructuring and weeks of work.
- Edit a website template: Many website building tools like WordPress offer a template system you can use to quickly start with a nice-looking webpage that minimizes the amount of changes you need to do. It’s the best option out there to start a website, rather than just designing and editing the whole page from scratch. These systems offer easy ways to switch between templates and alter different elements of said templates.
Who can edit a website?
Traditionally, only developers and web programmers or web masters were the ones that bore the weight of editing sites. When the world wide web started, it was a world reserved almost exclusively for technical people, because these were the ones that understood how the web was being built.
As years have passed by, more and more tools have emerged to allow anyone to create and edit websites, so right now it has switched from being a developer-only world to being a more democratized environment where many people are starting to create and edit websites by themselves.
Can you edit a web page? Anyone can edit websites?
Definitely! As we said, most websites nowadays are being built and edited by people that are not technical, that is: people that are not programmers, coders or developers.
Many systems like WordPress, Joomla, Wix, Weebly, Carrd or Webflow exist nowadays to easily create websites in a matter of minutes, and editing said websites is often a breeze! However, many times not everyone in the team has access to the tool or the job was externalized and now modifications need to be done, and that’s where other tools like Edit start having meaning.
What is the job title of someone who edits web sites?
When it comes to professionals of editing web sites, there’s different types:
- Web developers or programmers: Technical people with programming knowledge that know how to edit the code of a website to make modifications to it.
- Front-end web developers: Front-end means the part of the website facing customers, that is: what most people sees. These people often know how to program in different programming languages, including HTML, CSS and Javascript; and can make really deep and profound modifications to the overall look and feel of a website, and its behavior, too.
- Back-end web developers: Back-end means the part of the website that processes the data and users’ request. Most of the time, only the programmers have to deal with this part, but it’s a critical part to make any website work. If you want to significantly edit the way in which a website works, chances are that you will need a back-end developer to edit the existing code or develop new features.
- Full-stack web developers: These developers are the most rare and difficult to find. Full-stack means they’re both proficient as front-end developers and back-end developers, and their great part is that having just one of them many times allows to edit a website in any imaginable way. The downside, however, is that their salary often fluctuates in high ranges.
- System administrators: This was a common job title years ago, where you could also read “webmaster”, “website administrator” or just “admin”. It often refers to technical people that do any kind of work related to creating and maintaining a website, but it is nowadays more used people that handle with servers most of their time, rather than strictly programming.
- Marketers and copywriters: These are the most interesting types, because we’re living in a revolution era where anyone can edit websites, despite not having a technical background or any programming skills, and digital professionals are the ones that are benefiting the most from this. These professionals are largely marketers and copywriters, that is: people that use websites to convey a message and/or sell a product, and need to make many quick, simple changes to websites, more often than not just to test things out before a web developer actually makes the changes permanent.
Do I need a programmer or developer to edit my website?
As we have already outlined, web editing is being democratized. New tools have appeared that allow non-technical folks to build and edit their websites.
However, it stills needs to be evaluated in a case-by-case basis.
Website changes can be rather profound and significant, and if that’s the case, a developer might need to be involved in order to correctly execute the changes and make them permanent.
However, if the changes are just editing website texts or editing website pictures, chances are they can be done easily.
Is editing websites easy?
It depends largely on the tools being used. Most tools offer a nice WYSIWYG interface, a visual interface in which you can edit most aspects of the website without worrying much about technical details.
But, as we’ve already stated, it also depends on the kind of changes being made: text, colors and pictures are far way easier than editing structure or changing the entire design of a website.
Can I edit my website after publishing?
Of course! That’s what’s editing websites is all about.
You create a website, you like it, you publish it and some time later you discover a spelling mistake or want to change or improve the copywriting style of some particular page.
Publishing a website only means it’s made available for the general public to see, but it doesn’t mean people are going to come immediately to your website or that you are no longer allowed to edit your website.
A published website offers the same editing options an unpublished website would, and just like those, you can edit almost anything on them.
What are the best tools to edit web pages?
Many people use WordPress, and that’s what’s used to build the vast majority of websites in the internet nowadays.
However, there are many tools out there that are also really good, here are a few:
- WordPress
- Joomla
- Wix
- Weebly
- Carrd
- Webflow
But if you’re interested in a really easy, visual tool to make quick changes to websites, just to test things out and preview changes that could later be implemented either by you, or by a design team or a technical person, you should check out Edit!
