[thelist] web site maintenance woes

[David Bindel]

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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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