Great websites are boring to manage

Is your website for your Web team? Is it for your marketing manager? Is it for your communications manager? Or perhaps your branding manager? Or maybe some senior manager or politician?

Should it really be for those people? Will focusing on their needs genuinely help you achieve your objectives in the long term? Is pleasing the boss or making sure the Web team has fun the way to deliver real value?

Some of us are trapped. We have to please the boss because the boss has a huge ego and will never listen to reason, logic or evidence. Some of us are part of Web teams that essentially believe the purpose of the website is to help them:

I hate having to go back over pages on my website and see if they are still accurate and relevant. And I don’t do it nearly as much as I should. But all the evidence I have seen over the years is that customers will ruthlessly dismiss a website on which they come across out-of-date content. (Just like I do when I’m a customer on someone else’s site.)

On intranets, nobody wants to manage the processes of searching for people or content. Making sure on a day-to-day basis that the quality of search is up to a high standard is really boring work. But start talking about personalization and portals and everyone is jumping around wanting to get involved.