[thelist] web site maintenance woes (rant)

[Rebecca Milot-Bradford]

>  Get them copies of DreamWeaver (or FrontPage if you
>  prefer), teach yout coworkers how to make basic text
>  edits. [snip...]
>
>  Also, if you're doing a lot of tedious maintenance, it
>  might be advantageous to throw some stuff into
>  databases.

A few people have suggested various content management/spread out the
updates ideas. And I'm looking into implementing some of the suggestions as
quickly as possible. But how do you do any kind of quality control if people
from other departments are making updates? Or maybe that is a stupid
question, I don't have any experience with content management software, so
for all I know, this is addressed.

But updating the content is a very small piece of the overall work of
maintenance. There's also all the stuff like search engine positioning,
log/traffic analysis, link checking, tech support for the users, tweaking
site architecture, maintaining any databases the site uses, updating forms,
servicing sponsor agreements, creating ads, etc.

Right now the site I manage contains 2,629 files (only about 1300 of which
are web pages, the rest are scripts, images, etc). Of course, that doesn't
include all of the content that resides in databases. I cringe every time
someone asks me to add a whole new collection of material to the site,
because I feel overwhelmed trying to keep up with the existing site. I would
like to figure out what is the cost of maintaining the content on the site,
so that I can go back to management and say "hey, is putting this material
on the web site really a cost-effective thing to do? And if you want to go
ahead and do it, you'll need to allocate $x in the budget."

Well, ideally what I would like to do is figure out an effective way to
explain that the web site doesn't have to hold every document the
organization has produced in the past 25 years. And that every single
committee we have probably shouldn't spend all of their time figuring out
more things that could possibly be on the web site. I dunno, maybe I'm just
not good at business speak, but I can't seem to get the point across.

Thanks for letting me rant!

Becky