[thelist] web site maintenance woes

[Chris Mason]

I don't believe that teaching people HTML is the solution, they'll never
get it or feel comfortable with it, and you are likely to end up with a
big mess as there is no real way to enforce standards and design.
We have a multi-editor website project with non-technical contributors
at www.anguillaguide.com - we use an open-source based content
management system to allow non-tech users to add and edit, we have a
permissions system that controls access to the parts they are allowed to
edit, and the tag language is simple to learn. All they really need is
the ability to add an image, designate a header 1, header 2, bold and
add an email address or link.

Images are handled by the code so they don't have to know how to resize,
ftp, or do thumbnails.

There's also a WYSIWYG client which makes adding information as easy as
using a word processor.

If you need more information send me an email,

Chris


-----Original Message-----
From: thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org
[mailto:thelist-admin at lists.evolt.org] On Behalf Of David Bindel
Sent: Monday, July 22, 2002 11:55 PM
To: thelist at lists.evolt.org
Subject: RE: [thelist] web site maintenance woes


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> I find myself spending more and more time just maintaining our
> company site, with less and less time available for developing
> new "stuff." This is frustrating for me, because, well,
> maintaining is not nearly as interesting as building new. This
> is frustrating for my co-workers because they don't understand
> why I can't just keep building and building. It is frustrating
> for management because they don't understand why I am insisting
> that I need a slice of the budget pie. So here are my questions
> for all of you:
>
> 1) Are there any figures out there showing how much it costs to
> maintain a page? (I've searched Google and come up with nothing.)
> Or any suggestions about how to figure out what it costs us? In the
> eyes of people here, it costs nothing, since they are paying my
> salary regardless.

I'm really not sure about this.  I'll defer to [someone else], who is
much more qualified to answer this question than I.

> 2) Does anyone have ideas about how to convince management that
> we need more
> manpower if we want to keep expanding the site?

If your website is organized into departments, take a person from
each department and teach them some basic HTML.  You might need to
make some kind of interface so they can only edit the basic content
to protect them and the page.  But then let them take care of the
basic updates, and you'll have more time to work on the functionality
of the website.

Just my $0.02

David Bindel

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