Why someone should be in charge of your website: May 13, 2002 issue of New Thinking

May 13, 2002 New Thinking:
Why someone should be in charge of your website

Website content management

Home I About I Services I Clients I Contact

New Thinking Home

Subject Classification
Reader Feedback
Subscribing
Unsubscribing
2006
2005
2004
2003
2002
2001
2000
1999
1998
1997
1996

Books by
Gerry McGovern

Content Critical

Gaining competitive advantage through high-quality web content

The Web Content
Style Guide

The essential guide
for online writers, editors and managers

May 13, 2002

Why someone should be in charge of your website

By Gerry McGovern

If your website is important to your business it needs to be managed professionally. Unfortunately, websites are often designed and managed by committees. Everyone is in charge which means that nobody has control. This results in content that is of uneven style, tone and quality, and an information architecture that is muddled and inconsistent.

The Pope heads the Catholic Church. George Bush is the President of the United States. Steve Ballmer is CEO of Microsoft. Paul E. Steiger is managing editor of The Wall Street Journal. Yet in a great many websites, particularly intranets, nobody is in charge.

"In a world full of turf battles, it takes real courage to stand up and say, "Our intranet doesn't need an owner. It belongs to all of us -- and to none of us,"" George Anders wrote in the September 2001 issue of Fast Company magazine. I wonder would George Anders say the same about a car production line: "Our production line doesn't need an owner. It belongs to all of us -- and none of us."

What is an organization if not organized? Surely, one of the principal benefits of an organization is that it organizes human and physical assets so as to achieve certain objectives.

Why should the website be an exception? We don't say to office workers: "Go on there, figure out how the office should be run." We don't say to sales reps: "Go on there, do your own thing." Isn't this why we have managers? To manage. To plan. To organize.

Many websites do not have clear management structures. The people who run them may get some responsibility but they often lack authority. A reason this situation has occurred is because, historically, senior management did not understand the Web.

This resulted in them basically ignoring it. As a consequence, websites, and particularly intranets, grew organically because of the efforts of evangelists. These evangelists received pretty much zero support and budgets. Yet, they often achieved real results.

However, these evangelists had their own ideas as to how the website should be organized and what content should be on it. I once had a conversation with a consultant from a large consultancy. He told me that they had 1,000 separate intranets and that 950 of them were useless.

Some people champion evolution and community when it comes to the Web. Evolution has undoubted benefits, but can take millions of years to get it right. Business doesn't usually have that long. Community is a wonderful aspect of society, but community is not business. GE or Microsoft are not organized along community structures for very good reasons.

When someone comes to your website, they want to quickly and easily find out information. To support this need requires complex planning and ongoing management.

As Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path writes, "If your web site simply exposes your messy and silo-ed enterprise, the customer will assume the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. But if the site achieves consistency throughout, it presents a unified front that allows the customer to accomplish what they've set out to do there."

The organization that does not put someone in charge of its website is shirking its responsibilities and short-changing its website readers.

Gerry McGovern

Next issue: Time for communications to take charge of your website
Previous issue: Knowledge management: from lifelong employment to lifelong learning
New Thinking homepage

"The term "bible" is now highly over-used in reference to tech books – but if it weren't, that's how I would categorize Content Critical."
Rowan Wilson, Knowledge Management Review

"Content Critical is the best non-technical book on the subject of web content that I have come across to date … For those interested in the ‘change management’ dimension of content and knowledge management, Content Critical may well become the standard text."
Andy Harrison, Content Management Focus magazine

Buy Content Critical

New Thinking Newsletter
Subscribe to this free weekly newsletter covering the role and function of content on the Web.
More info | Privacy policy
Read the current issue

Email Address:

 Subscribe  Unsubscribe

The organization that does not put someone in charge of its website is shirking its responsibilities and short-changing its website readers.

Content Critical is recommended reading at the following universities

Augustana College, United States
Drury University, United States
Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland
Indiana University, United States
Monash University, Australia
University of Applied Sciences, Germany
University of Regina, Canada
University of Teesside, UK
Manchester Metropolitan University

Find out more about Content Critical