A: I love this question because I relate to it very well. It's like going to the car repair shop. It sucks. The repair guy will most likely charge you a lot for his expertise. But, what's worse, once he fixes what was wrong you'll inevitably have to go back to him and pay him more money for something else that's wrong. A never ending cycle of money leaving your grasp and the need to rely on someone entirely. Worst case scenario: I build your site and you love it (hopefully). One day, you are forced to change the name of your business and your website content for some reason. I have been hit by a car. What do you do? You can find someone else to fix what's wrong, but they would have to explore the code I've written and learn how I set things up for you before they make the changes for you (sans a Ken Pond). This is costly and it's something I've had to do for others when their web person quit/was fired/died. Here's an aphorism that suites this dilemma: Give a person a fish and they eat for a day, teach a person to fish - and they eat for a lifetime. I do my best to teach a client to fish. In another words, I build sites using tools and methods that make it easy for my client (with a little coaching) to make some pretty significant changes one their own. A moderately web-savvy person (someone who is, at least, very familiar with checking email, making purchases online, or has some kind of social networking profile on Facebook or the like) can easily learn to change things on their own site. I use a fairly popular engine called Joomla. Joomla allows people to sign in to a "back-end" (a back-end has nothing to do with one's buttocks, at least, in this particular case, rather  it refers to a place you can go on the web that the public never sees). It requires you to have a user name and a password to sign in. Once signed in, you can add articles, pictures, change colors, add new menu items, even send mass-emails to all your customers - all without my help. Of course, some of the back-end is not easily understandable or intuitive to most people. So, I may have have to talk you through some more advanced changes. But, the more you put into learning your way around your Joomla back-end, the more independent you can be. Joomla has wonderful forums that answer almost any question a layperson may have in lay terms. It is an incredible system that gives people a great deal of control over their site. I teach seminars on Joomla and give private instruction that makes this new territory much less confusing. Don't get me wrong - this independence doesn't happen over night, and there will always be things that you should leave to the experts. More advanced technical issues generally require hiring an experienced web developer. Thus, there will always be car repair shops. But you can, at least, learn to change the oil and replace filters, etc. to keep your trips there to a minimum. I know very little about cars. I can replace the windshield wiper fluid like a pro. But, If I tried to replace my transmission on my own, the results would be unreliable at best, and  possibly fatal. Be realistic about what you can do yourself and what needs to be done by a developer. Even if it's not me.