Marcs.ws

All too often I see sites that are out of date, blase, or so ancient that even the logo on them is wrong. Why? Everyone believes that web sites are essentially mission critical in our business culture. Although they are only passive marketing, they do provide an excellent arena for your stakeholders to get information, utilize your services and engage in transactions. They are generally the only place this can be done at 3 am on a Tuesday morning when you have insomnia… . No that insomnia crack isn’t out of the scope of this article because your web site should be working pas the normal business hours of 9 am to 5 pm (Go I wish I only worked those hours).

Sites are not kept up to date because it is no one’s job to keep them up to date. No this does not have to be someone’s full time job, but there should be someone in your organization that should be incharge of coordinating web site updates online either through a 3rd party development firm/developer or through a content management system. What more this person should have the power to request any information from an entity in your firm and have that request become a medium level priority. THIS PERSON SHOULD HAVE MANAGEMENT BEHIND TO ENFORCE THIS.

Why did that get all caps? Because in some instances management intervention is need for someone to spend the 30 minutes to an hour needed to review their content and get updated content to the coordinator.

Ever have an older person say to you “If I had a penny for everytime [insert statement here]… .” Oh yes, that applies here too. One of the main reasons that web design and development projects get slowed down is due to several different end users all trying to be 100% satisfied with the end product…actually, most could care less about the end product, they just want to feel a site looks pretty.

THIS IS NOT A BAD THING.  It shows that your personelle want to show pride and ownership in your site, I mean after all isn’t it supposed to accurately and definatively represent your new business and appeal to to existing as well as new clientel?

So what is wrong with getting (and hopefully not getting too) many opinion? The problem is letting all those opinions have an equal voice in the life of the project. This is not saying that others thoughts can’t be extremely valuable and potentially great ideas. The problem is when everyone attempts to have their suggestions carried out you start to seem time delays. The statement of “You can please most of the people some of the time, but not all the people all of the time” is true.

To combat that I suggest the following rule (disclaimer – I have never served in the armed forces…not my cup of tea):

Take an example from the armed forces. The person that pays the bills, or the comittee that selected the designer/developer should act as president (yes, many people as one) and select a general. This general should be tasked with seeing the site to it’s implementation.The general gets to make the important decisions about what is used, where how and when.  The general can have his soldiers involved with each of these tasks as long as the general knows that the general, and only the general, has the final word in the matter.

Will everyone like this…no. Can some of the soldiers hold resentment for the general for not implementing, or implementing other’s suggestions, sure. Is this different from anything else in your business today? I hope you can answer yes, but for the majority of firms it is no. Abiding by the General and Soldiers rules will allow you to more efficiently and effectively carry out these types of projects. Just don’t start any wars.