If you find any of those website elves, send them my way

Is it just me, or do you find in your organisation that people expect websites to mushroom by magic, as if little elves were at work while you slept?

I’ve lost count of how many newsrooms I’ve come across which rely on the efforts of a single, young, overworked web editor to monitor and update their website 24 hours a day, seven days a week (impossible, of course, they just do their best Monday to Friday and hope nothing breaks on the weekend to make them look like muppets).

And then there’s the large institutions which have nothing – NOTHING – in the budget for maintaining some of their websites. Nothing. Nada. No one to make sure the sites are up to date, clean, free of dead links, lovely to look at, useful.

Did I nod off and miss the memo that said websites are for free?

Here’s the way I see it:

1. Publish a magazine/newspaper… it costs you money, you get sponsorship/sell advertising, you pay people to produce it.

2. Publish a website… it costs you money, you get sponsorship/sell advertising, you pay people to produce it.