Many organisations dream about having a distributed web editor organisation, allowing each department to update their respective parts of the website and subject matter experts to contribute with their knowledge and make the company shine.
In reality, what often happens is that:
- The web content management system is too difficult to use for all but the very few super users that work with the system for 8 hours day and day out.
- Since most employees still don’t know how to write for the web, most content created by the infrequent web editors is quite bad; this ends up reflecting poorly on the company.
- Most members of the understaffed web team spend all their time travelling around and carrying out training in CMS and writing for the web. Unfortunately, working on the website is treated as a hobby, so the task of updating the website is passed around so quickly that people have rotated to another task before they actually master the tasks of writing for the web and using the system. With a new CMS every 3 years, most casual web editors don’t really become proficient in the existing system, before a new system is in the pipeline.
With few exceptions, most organisations would be far better off with few and centralised web editors with good web content writing skills who would not need regular support in using the system.
I’ve helped many organisations around the world select a new content management system. Often, ease-of-use for infrequent editors has been an important selection criterion. Unfortunately, in reality many end up with an expensive compromise system that accommodates neither the super users nor the infrequent users.
If you have somebody in your organisation with decent IT skills and a good understanding of writing for the web who voluntarily wants to help out, then that’s great. As the web becomes increasingly important for your organisation, you might be better off telling everybody else to focus on their day job and not get involved in editing the website, which might well create more problems for you.
Having few web editors could also lead to less content on your website; for the majority of websites that would actually be a very good development in 2009.
Sam Kleinman January 19th, 2009 23:27
I concur that the distributed web-editor model isn’t the most effective one around, but at the same time I’m not sure that re-centralizing solves the problem either.
One issue is that, even simple website-editing is really three distinction and potentially conflicting jobs rolled into one. There’s the “publisher” role and the “editor/content creator role” and the “production/typsetting/copy-writing” role, and one person would be hard pressed to do all of these things well.
The second part is that the qualifications that make someone a good editor and website manager, are often not the same qualities that make someone a good writer/content generator, particularly in more specialized fields, so to avoid “pitching” content to the lowest common denominator, distribution some of the content creation is a virtual requisite.
Having said that, I agree, in this case, that less is more.
J. Boye » Blog Archive » DIY SharePoint June 30th, 2009 23:27
[...] adjusted the number of content contributors from 200 to 60 [not a bad idea according to Janus Boye: Few web editors is better for your website]. These have been trained to write better for the web. Still, strange things are happening when we [...]