How to succeed in Web publishing.
I’ve worked with quite a few print publications on their efforts to establish and/or modernize their online presence, and the success stories have one thing in common: someone, one person, in the organization who has ownership of the website and wants to evangelize for it. For a larger print publication, this person usually sits at the VP level and has the authority and resources to implement their vision, and the tenacity to follow up and drive the team. But for a smaller shop, for a place with a lot of different things going on and a lot of different people doing a little bit of everything, it can be anyone willing to own the site and stand up for it.
Suffer through this analogy with me: buying a publishing platform and a Web strategy is like buying a plane. Skilled people design and build and customize the thing to your specifications, show you how the controls work, take the controls for a quick barrel roll to impress the hell out of you, and then pull out the pilot’s seat for you and walk away. Sure, they probably promise that “this plane flies itself, a child could do it,” which is probably true, but it glosses over the big detail: someone has to fly the plane to get anywhere. Some planes are easier to fly than others, but someone has to be at the controls.
Whenever I start a new project, I know right away if it’s going anywhere. If there’s one person who knows it’s going to be up to them to make sure the content keeps flowing, the user community is attended to, the metrics get more than a passing glance, and the website is a source of pride for the organization — they’ve got a fighting chance.
If, on the other hand, the conversation is about who’s going to do what chore to feed the website when we have a minute to spare during our real work, I know the plane isn’t getting off the ground. Planes have autopilots and good publishing platforms make effective use of automation, but planes still need pilots and websites still need web editors.
If you’ve got someone with the skills and the drive the own the website, fantastic. If you’ve got someone with the drive and the ability to learn the skills, that’ll work. You can teach someone how to work the controls, but you can’t teach someone how to be excited about it. But if you don’t have any of these people, hire someone from the start. It’s much more expensive to build a website that can’t get off the ground.
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