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On Wed, Feb 17, 1999 at 10:42:53AM +0000, Brian Kelly wrote: > "What are the main problems facing Web managers?". Can we come up with a > list of the top 10 challenges facing web managers. Here's top ten. Not all my words. Not all my ideas at all. I think I agree with them all and see them as possible challenges to be overcome. It's late, so some of the wording has gone eccentric. The other author can step forward and say hello if he likes... Conservatism/Half-baked management tech ideas These two are apparently at odds, but if you suffer from either of them, your life will be hell. The first is the inability to do or try anything new, so your site ends up looking like it was done in the early days of the web. The latter and you end up jumping through hoops while knowing it's never going to work. It is possible to have both simultaneously. Lack of specification When designing a site, it is so difficult to get a real specification out of the commissioner until you've come up with a draft and get "no, I didn't want that". If you're lucky, you'll get a specification at that point. If not, you resort to a mind-meld. Lack of staff Not just a simple "need more people", but also need more people with the right skills in the right part of the organisation. It's worse having loose cannons in other departments than just not having enough staff. Lack of infrastructure investment Emphasis is on churning out pages, rather than building custom website solutions which the users can use to run the site with minimum of webmanager involvement. Group-editing software only now really beginning to emerge It's been very difficult to have multiple editors working on a site. Whether any of the emerging technologies will actually catch on and work, or whether the people-based solutions of devolving subsites are still the best. Finding time to keep up with the World (Wide Web). All the new standards, new technologies, running on internet time AND trying to do a full time job (or two) Platform incompatibilities If I had a fiver for each time I've been emailed a MS Office file... I do not have Office. I do not have any Micro$oft software. I need to tattoo this onto the insides of some lusers' eyelids. Fortunately, catdoc and strings work wonders. Inability to focus resources There is real resistence to dividing the site audience and presenting them with a default page that better serves them than a general welcome. Sometimes it's on the part of the webmanager, sometimes it's the webmanager's manager. MJR -- Editor-in-chief, The Student Web at UEA http://www.stu.uea.ac.uk/ %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%