If you're a small business owner, chances are you have a website, but it hasn't been updated in a while, and you feel vaguely guilty every time you think about it. It probably has some old information you should get rid of, and you could stand to add some photos of your recent projects, or add a page about some new services you're offering.

You're not lazy, and you care about communicating with your customers. So what keeps you from updating the site? Most likely it's the bottleneck of having to get in touch with whoever you hired to do your site in the first place, and asking them to make the updates.

There's a much better way. For a few hundred dollars, you can get your friendly local web developer (ahem) to create an adminstrative backend to your site so you're in control of the content. Need to change your contact information? It's a five-minute job—just open up http://www.[yourwebsite].com/admin, click on "Edit contact page," and voilà. Adding a new page, or getting rid of an old one, is just as simple. And you don't need to know anything about web design to do it, either.

This idea has been around for quite some time. It's called content management, and big sites have been using it for several years. But it used to be a lot more expensive. You not only had to hire someone to reconfigure the site, but you also had to pay a monthly or yearly licensing fee for the software that ran the backend. In the last several years, though, free (open-source) alternatives have popped up all over the place, and some of them have been around long enough now to get the bugs out. This means all you have to do is pay a one-time fee for a developer to reconfigure your site, and from then on you're in control. No more guilt about not updating your site, or frustration with an unresponsive web developer. And all for the cost of one direct-mail piece.