In no particular order, here are ten things put together by 
John Bennett of Canterbury Christ Church University College 
and myself:

1. The need for a coherent strategy for print and 
electronic information. These need to be worked on 
toghether from the initial stages of conception, 
espeicially if duplication is deemed necessary.

2. Different areas of an insitution are responsible for 
different content. Though there are close relationships 
between some of the areas in terms of content, publishing 
across traditional administrative boundaries is often 
difficult or avoided completely.

3. Resources needed are of a diverse nature - time, 
personnel, hardware, software etc and often responsility 
for providing these also crosses boundaries. Ways of 
working together  - i.e. the team or committee web - need 
to be established and delivered.

4. Information Management is not just knowing HTML. Here I 
insert a quote recently forwarded to me:

"Designing pages in HTML is a lot like having sex in a bathtub. If you
don't know anything about sex, it won't help to know a lot about
bathtubs."

Michael L. Kaufman

This also goes for managing information. I find that few 
people think they need any more than someone who knows 
HTML. We must be beyond that now - and probably should 
never have been there in the first place.

5. The diversity of skills that are needed is very large. 
>From basic text and image display to scripting and server 
maintenance - this is often not appreciated.

6. Both of us would love nice tidy solutions to generating 
automatic sensible and useful indexes, tours and what's new 
listings. So far, our search has been hampered by lack of 
time and necessary skills.

7. Database publishing

The answer to all of our dreams alledgedly but is actually 
a dream itself for us at the moment.

8. Measuring effectiveness and convincing web funders to 
pay out for development is a problem espeicially when 
short-term return is unlikely and long-term return is so 
difficult to pin down and demonstrate.

9. Keeping up-to-speed technically is so hard. Then browser 
compatibility and accessibility makes some of the learning 
difficult to implement - the balance is hard to strike.

10. Easy controls for write and read permission eludes our 
systems at the moment. Controlling write access for authors 
and better defined read access for users is technically 
tricky and time consuming particularly if you have the 200 
web authors that Kent has!

Hope this provokes some more thought or re-inforces some 
other popular problems.

Miles Banbery (UKC) and John Bennett (CCUC)
http://www.ukc.ac.uk/	http://www.canterbury.ac.uk/

On Wed, 17 Feb 1999 10:42:53 +0000 (GMT) Brian Kelly 
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> I've been asked to give a seminar which will address web management
> issues.  I'd be interested in the views of web managers on
> "What are the main problems facing Web managers?". Can we come up with a
> list of the top 10 challenges facing web managers.
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Brian Kelly
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------
> Brian Kelly, UK Web Focus
> UKOLN, University of Bath, BATH, England, BA2 7AY
> Email:  [log in to unmask]     URL:    http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/
> Homepage: http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/ukoln/staff/b.kelly.html
> Phone:  01225 323943            FAX:   01225 826838

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Miles E.C. Banbery, University Web Editor
Communications & Development Office and Education Support Services
G1, The Registry, The University, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NF.
Tel. 01227 827767, Fax. 01227 764464



%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%