Building a maintainable website for someone who is computer "illiterate"...

[ZipOnTrousers]

K, so my dad is about to go into a new job working with a very small local garage, handling all the advertising and finances, etc. He really wants to modernise the garage and re-organize a few things, one of those being a professional looking website that would allow local people to quickly check prices of services, contact details, check which cars are currently for sale, etc. I'm a student of CS and offered to do this for free (one guy was going to charge him over £400... ).

The thing is, if I was available to be on hand with this all the time I would just make each individual page as he needed it and upload it. Due to the nature of the business the contents of the pages would be changed and updated very frequently and my dad isn't totally computer literate and knows nothing of XHTML/CSS...

So I was wondering what the best solution would be so that I could:

Design the original core site myself
Host this
Allow my dad to access and edit the content of these pages (add pages, delete/update elements, etc) without ruining the structure of the site, i.e messing with any code
It would have to be extremely intuitive and easy to use, basically once its setup it really needs to be quite reliable and robust and not require much maintenance

Are there any tools you guys would recommend for this? Is this what CMSs such as Joomla are used for? I've never had to design a site for someone ELSE to run before, and since I don't want my dad to have to go through me to do everything with his own site I was wondering what the best way to go about this is...

(Just a note, for now the site is basically just an informative sort of thing. There are no payments/orders/forms to handle. The only real scripting will be the simple drop down menu. Other than that it is just simple text/images which needs to be very easy to update and maintain.)

[WingedPanther]

Why not let him use Kompozer to handle mockups between edits?

[ZipOnTrousers]

Had never heard of KompoZer before that post WP, it looks really useful. By mockups, do you mean allow him to use KompoZer to make like a plan for what he wants the page to look like to allow me to implement it? Or do you think KompoZer is a useful enough tool to solely maintain this site using just Kompozer?

[WingedPanther]

I would NOT use it for maintaining the site. It can do a lot of nasty code bloat. It's handy for quick mockups.

[ZipOnTrousers]

So is there anything you can recommend that would give him more direct control over the content of the actual site on a day to day basis, or am I pretty much stuck handling all the actual changes myself?

[WingedPanther]

Nothing simple to create

[JGRobinson]

Hi

Just a few thoughts.

I suspect that you would be able to do it with Joomla without too much problem - however I think that it would be worthwhile going through with your Dad what he will be changing regularly - Its been my experience that when you dig into things it usually falls into a couple of different patterns.

Once you have identified these patterns then it would be reasonably straight forward to come up with a plan for these dynamic parts, you could code these dynamic parts in php or some other dynamic language or even let him use an html editor - if its simple enough and away from the rest of the site - why not ?

But as I say you would be able to use a CMS, but it might be overkill