Increasingly the responsibility of a company’s website is falling to the marketing department, with issues of branding, content, promotions and news all sitting within their control. However, much of the time this is complicated by the fact that the IT department actually ‘owns’ the website and without it the information would not appear there at all.
The gap between the people who generate the information and those who deliver it to the website can cause significant problems. For the majority of businesses, changes on a website can only be carried out by people with the necessary technical skills Java, HTML, and so on yet this presents two difficulties:
It increases the workload of the technical team by giving them routine copy-editing tasks to complete.
It stops those people within an organisation who generate the content from becoming more actively involved in the way it appears online.
The first of these problems can cost time and money, as expensive resources become routinely distracted by what should be non-technical duties, such as taking copy and converting it to HTML to then be uploaded onto a web page. The second problem can lead to a website becoming out of date with stale content left without regular updates. Unless changes are made to the way information on web pages is managed, the investment in your company website could turn out to have been a waste of time, as out-of-date copy on a web page could turn potential customers away.
Pulling in different directions
A report from Jupiter Research last year confirms the above. In Jupiter Research’s interviews with hundreds of web executives, a picture emerged of multiple stakeholders with conflicting objectives, pulling companies’ websites in different directions.
At most large companies, marketing, customer service and IT departments all play a role in web decision-making. While marketing is concerned with brand building and growth, customer service focuses on satisfaction and call deflection, IT is generally motivated by cost reduction and technical objectives like infrastructure simplification. While attempting to use their websites to serve the interests of the numerous corporate constituents who control the purse strings, many web businesses fail to maximise the value of the site to the business overall.
Website governance is a tangled, often highly political affair, commented Jupiter Research Senior Vice President David Schatsky, author of the study and head of research at Jupiter Research. As a result, even very sophisticated companies are challenged to extract the most value from their online presence.
Common problems
The following are widely reported.
- Wasted resources: a single change to the website can involve up to six people to write, proof, sign-off, schedule, code and quality check before publishing and each change to the site, when taken as a separate task, takes a lot of time to implement. For example to change a header from ‘September’ to ‘October Promotions’ can take hours with sign-offs, scheduling into the IT department’s workload, coding changes and finally quality checks.
- Ownership: IT own more than they should driving marketing by telling them what they will get trying to impose the function on the business, rather than enabling the business to drive the demand for technology.
- Focus: Marketing doesn’t always know what it wants. People in marketing are not IT buyers and generally don’t have the understanding of what is available.
- Speed: IT sometimes doesn’t move fast enough for marketing and delivery of online solutions. As each single change is timely, it is often the case that changes build up and amendments to the website are scheduled to the IT department for perhaps once a week. This prevents a dynamic site and hinders daily/hourly updates and promotional activities. It can also hinder consistent messaging and branding.
Website organisation the set up
In an age where websites are already a key marketing tool, and in the advent of increasing digital communications, the corporate website is set to become the hub of a business’s communications strategy.
In order to get it right you must be in control of the maintenance of that information. It would be foolish to argue there’s no obvious overlap between IT and marketing people when it comes to the company website, but by looking at the core responsibilities of these two groups we can maybe begin to avoid the problems this overlap can create.
A division of labour to ensure the best from everyone could look something like this:
Marketing takes control of everything that is visible to the customer. That would include design what the website looks like, the placement of logos, text areas, graphics and so on; content what is on the site, graphics, up-to-date information, latest news, promotions, images; structure the site map / how the site is laid out, the navigation path; branding where and how branding is used, which is different from the content on the site.
The IT department takes control of the infrastructure that the website runs on. This encompasses the technical infrastructure what the system runs on, its scalability and reliability; integration building connections with other systems and troubleshooting, thus freeing time for when problems do arise.
To be able to take charge of the website, marketing people need a non-technical management tool, combined with the ability and freedom to control the areas of the website that require marketing and communications messaging ie. everything that is visible to the customer. They also need the control to avoid the content falling foul of a publication bottleneck, so tools to give immediate responses to keep up with the demanding pace of marketing changes are a necessity.
Conversely, the IT department needs the management tool to be robust, reliable, secure and scalable. After all, the IT department would hardly see the benefit in having routine copy-editing tasks taken away if they found the number of help-desk calls increased dramatically.
Organising ownership
In order to determine how best to manage your website, you first need to look at your assets:
- What types of information do you have? Documents,, downloads, news releases, maps, product brochures etc.
- How is it currently managed? Separate teams responsible for publishing information to specific areas
- Who is responsible for different elements? Messaging, branding, PR
- How do you make changes? What is the process you currently go through; how long is sign-off for each item; how would you like to amend/maintain the site
- And finally, in an ideal world what would be the most efficient and most accurate way to add or make changes to a piece of content?
You then need to sit down and build a roadmap outlining the different types of information on your website, who within the company should have access to each type of page, who should make the changes to copy, who should approve and sign-off this work and who should publish it to the site.
From there it is just a matter of finding the software to allow you to do this as seamlessly as possible.
Software can ease the process
Managing a web presence is a business problem and as such, needs a business solution. Control over the way your website is managed needs to be placed in the hands of the people who own site visibility, not left solely with the IT department.
Content management is a solution for serious websites which are driven by the business, yet still loved by IT, and can deliver an environment where all aspects of the business can achieve their own web objectives.
The IT department requires a solution that integrates with existing corporate systems and adheres to their overall strategy, whilst communications professionals are accustomed to tools that relate to their needs in everyday working and are familiar, understandable and accessible.
Visual tools required
Tools to manage your website should be highly visual and targeted at the specific task at hand. These tools will need to be graphical, immediate, powerful and flexible just like the Microsoft Office applications we are all already used to but this new generation of applications will need to be fully multi-user for team working and collaboration.
Being no more difficult to use than, for example Microsoft PowerPoint, they should be capable of being deployed to tens or hundreds of users working simultaneously on one web application. They should be more task and audience-focused pushing technological boundaries and lifting restrictions imposed by the previous generation of tools.
In short, there is no need for a divide between the IT and marketing departments. There should be no competition over the company’s website, just a clear understanding of the business needs involved.Choosing the right software to suit those business needs can save an untold amount of time and money, and enable you to get real value out of your online assets.