Social media marketing | Liz Hover's Diary of a Web Gal

Remember my new internet superhero Gerry McGovern?

Well he made my heart go pitter patter when I read his latest post Great websites are boring to manage.

That isn’t to say I agree with everything he says. But I adore his sock-it-to-em style.

I manage a website and my job is never boring. Or rarely so.

Over the last few months I’ve realised something about my working style and what makes me tick: I love a good challenge. I enjoy troubleshooting. I like to fix the problem. Or at least try.

In his article, Gerry says he hates doing website reviews, checking the accuracy of older information. Well I’m lucky. I like ongoing review. I usually find it’s a good excuse to tighten up website copy.

Gerry says that “… doing interesting and challenging work is often what makes problems for websites, making them technically complicated, graphically overwrought and content heavy.”

In redeveloping the National Screen Institute website we worked hard to avoid these pitfalls. But I do think it’s an ongoing challenge for web managers to keep things simple, go easy on the graphics and always use less words than you think you need.

Gerry goes on to say “Day-to-day web management is about rolling up your sleeves and getting your hands dirty with the nitty gritty stuff. But remember: You get paid to be bored.”

That’s me – I’m there rolling up my sleeves every day getting my hands covered in grease. And rarely is it boring work. I’m sourcing free Flash slide generators, editing audio interviews, uploading video to YouTube, keeping an eye on our Twitter account, creating online ads, testing our film festival content, scouring the latest news for stuff I can post to our website and always, always thinking about how to improve things without being technically complicated and or spending much money.

That isn’t to say everything I do is on a shoestring – in one of my ‘improvement’ moments I had an idea for a major change on our website (which will roll out in June sometime). And I’m very excited about it. It’s a basic feature (yeah, Gerry might think it was boring) but it came about because of ongoing website review.

Gerry McGovern will continue to write things that make my heart go pitter patter. And I will continue to be excited about the simple stuff.

Photo courtesy of ittybittiesforyou via a Creative Commons Licence

Something very important was underlined for me today.

In my opinion, my dear colleagues at the National Screen Institute have always been exceptional.

And I’ve come to appreciate I need those exceptional people in place so that I can do my job as a web manager.

And before you ask, no, this isn’t some sycophantic post.

I’m serious.

Many of the staff at the National Screen Institute are vital to the process of website management.

Each person plays to their strengths and together we make it happen.

So why was this underlined today?

I work with our manager of corporate communications to pull together information for a certain section of our website. It’s an important section so invariably there’s much news.

The timing and organisation of that news is expertly handled by the corporate communications manager. She and I make a brilliant team. Really.

Each week I post the information and I know I can rely on her to get the stuff together. So while I’m juggling 72 things I know this is taken care of.

And our marketing and communications manager flagged an idea we’d had many months ago. A great idea that was still sitting in my back pocket. She’s going to drive that project.

If you want to manage a website well, surround yourself with great people.

They should be folks you know you can rely on. Once you’ve got them in place everything else is easy.

I don’t have endless schedules created in Excel.

I don’t have daily or weekly website meetings.

Instead, I have colleagues that I can communicate with. I can walk to their desk and have a conversation.

If you don’t have this bit right then you’re buggered.