- SharePoint 2010 - 5 Hot Features to Look Forward To
- Selecting a CMS: How to Build a Short List
- Alterian Drops Immediacy, Morello Web CMS Brands
- Installing SharePoint 2010 on Windows 7
- How SharePoint 2010’s Metadata Services Increase Usability
- Gartner’s Top 5 BPM Predictions for 2010 And Beyond
- Open Text Reports Good Q2, Vignette Contributes to YoY Spike
Get the NewsletterGreat Websites are Boring to Manage
Great websites help you complete simple, common tasks in a fast, efficient manner. They are boring to design and manage.
Is your website for your web team? Is it for your marketing manager? Is it for your communications manager? Or perhaps your branding manager? Or maybe some senior manager or politician?
Should it really be for those people? Will focusing on their needs genuinely help you achieve your objectives in the long term? Is pleasing the boss or making sure the web team has fun the way to deliver real value?
Some of us are trapped. We have to please the boss because the boss has a huge ego and will never listen to reason, logic or evidence. Some of us are part of web teams that essentially believe the purpose of the website is to help them:
- achieve their personal or departmental objectives
- express themselves and develop new skills
- have fun and do cool things
Many of the things we need to do to create a great website are very, very boring. Like ongoing review. I hate having to review. I hate having to go back over pages on my website and see if they are still accurate and relevant. And I don't do it nearly as much as I should. But all the evidence I have seen over the years is that customers will ruthlessly dismiss a website on which they come across out-of-date content. (Just like I do when I'm a customer on someone else's website.)
On intranets, nobody wants to manage the processes of searching for people or content. Making sure on a day-to-day basis that the quality of search is up to a high standard is really boring work. But start talking about personalization and portals and everyone is jumping around wanting to get involved.
It's natural and perfectly understandable that we all want to do interesting work and avoid boring work. I want to do interesting work as much as anyone. However, doing interesting and challenging work is often what makes problems for websites, making them technically complicated, graphically overwrought and content heavy.
I came across a website recently that was horrendous to navigate. It had frames everywhere and all sorts of other clever navigational devices that left you totally confused. The organization had lots of really talented, young programmers who were very passionate about the Web. Their passion and desire to express themselves had led to a nightmare website.
It's the same with a lot of content people. Giving a website to a communicator is like giving a pub to an alcoholic. A huge number of graphic designers are still wedded to the print design approaches. They focus much more on making the website look beautiful than work beautifully.
What's fun, unfortunately, is often frivolous and counter-productive when it comes to web management. It's hard to do the boring stuff like removing old content and making sure that every page has a unique title tag. Day-to-day web management is about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty with the nitty gritty stuff. But remember: You get paid to be bored.
About the Author
Gerry McGovern, a content management author and consultant, has spoken, written and consulted extensively on writing for the web and web content management issues since 1994.
Was this article useful?
Email It
Stumble It
Add RSS2 Reader Comments
Leave a Response
Processing...
From our Job Board View all jobs
| 
Jobs RSS feed
| Post a job right now
Featured Events View all events
| Events RSS feed
| Add your event
- Feb 17, 2010 – Webinar: 4 Essential Strategies for Advancing Your Website's Business Impact
- Feb 26, 2010 – Intelligent Content 2010
- Apr 21, 2010 – Drupalcon San Francisco 2010
- May 5, 2010 – CMS Expo 2010 (Evanston)
- Oct 7, 2010 – HartmanEVENT 2010 - Social Media & Mobile Usability
This is very much worth thinking and talking about.
One of the criticisms of PPT use is that people try to use all the features in their project, leading to disastrous presentations with dissolve/checkerboard/fly-in mania happening.
I wonder about websites and web development where we consider that we are legitimate only when we have all the possible features of a website up and running. I bounce around between having the needed features, feeds, rich media, participation, community building, etc. and the actually used features.
One site I know sees 85% of traffic going to two sections. Should the 0% visitors sections get iced? I don't think so, but priorities in terms of design and presentation likely need to be adjusted.
Are you a minimalist in terms of design? Like Google's homepage?
This is an excellent article, hits the nail on the head about the functioning of a website. Before things get laborious and boring, I'd suggestion you incorporate a good CMS. This will allow for most things like updating the site, moving content to archives, removing time bound content, adding landing pages etc to be made mechanical. If you are looking for a good CMS take a look at those by CrownPeak. CrownPeak has a product for every customer be it individual or business and their prices are attractive too. For details you might want to visit http://www.crownpeak.com/