Hi all,
New to this forum, so a quick background. I learned html myself, I never went to school for it. So many things I am a bit ignorant on. I use mostly Adobe ImageReady and Wordpad to build my websites (I have a graphics designer design the site). We haven't done anything too complicated at the moment.

I've got a few clients who are asking if we can get them some sort of login where they can peridocially change certain portions of their website, for example a news section, have a blog, or in some cases add/remove products.

I know something like this exists because the website at my previous place of employment has one. To get to it you types in www.websitename.com/admin And then there was a login page.

I don't even know what something like this is called to do a search for. I also don't seen domething complicated. The one at my previous job was quite complicated, you could darn near redo the entire website with it.

THanks in advance for your help!

i am not clear.. on what exactly do you wish to know.. can you elaborate a little more...?

It's like a log in for web clients, where the owners of the website can make changes to certain parts of the website without having to contact a web designer all the time.

For example, if they have news that is constantly updated. Instead of calling me every week, they could log on and there is a WYSIWYG editor were they could type in the latest news, hit submit, and it would automatically publish it to the webpage.

Soory, I just suck at explaining things.

Sounds like you're after building a CMS or similar.
There's a lot of Content Management Systems available, or you could build your own with something like PHP or Ruby on Rails.

A CMS would allow users to log in and make changes to site content without them asking you to do it for them.

There's a number of freely available WYSIWYG editors around, but my personal choice is TinyMCE 3.x as it outputs cleaner code than some of the others (it doesn't do pretty formatting of code by default, but the code is at least valid XHTML).

Also, I learned everything I know about HTML \ XHTML, CSS, PHP, Ruby on Rails and MySQL (and other languages \ technologies) myself with a little help from Google.
I've only ever bought one book on web development, which was Rails Recipes...

As nuvo has said, what you need is a CMS where site owners can manage content by themselves without the need to contact the developer all the time.

And as far as open-source CMSes go, there is none better than Joomla and Drupal.

Awesome! Now I at least have a starting point to go from.
Thanks alot guys, you bet I'll be visiting this forum more often!

You want a CMS (content management system). Give MAMBO or JOOMLA a go. You should be able to instantly install one in your site from your web hosting control panel

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Thanks all, I just downloaded and installed Mambo for testing on my work server. Talk about lack of instructions! I have not really been able to find anyting other than install instructions fot this thing. I've been up and down the mambo forum, and searching the web. You'd figure Mambo would have instructions for their own software or something....

Anyways, all I see for this things are "templates' to use. First off, how do you use this without using one of their predesigned templates? Our websites are anything but template related. Can Mambo or any CMS even be used on existing websites?

Hope the replies has satisfied your queries

Thanks for all the replies.
Even i came to know something new

Try http://graffiticms.com/ < this one is cool however its still pretty new and lacks instructions for someone starting out.

and even wordpress would works as a simple CMS