Comments on: Too Many Chefs in the Home Page

By: Lisa Junker

Lisa Junker — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 20:47:15 +0000

And to build off David and Ellen’s points above, I think it’s far easier (not easy, just easier) to find one benevolent dictator who’s good at his/her job than it is to find a dozen people throughout the organization who are good at managing a website and good at their actual jobs (since in my experience decentralized web teams are made up of folks who have other full-time jobs, and just contribute to the web team on the side).

By: David Gammel

David Gammel — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:23:31 +0000

Ha! Well, I supposed I do have an implicit assumption in there that the dictator is competent at directing a web site.

You also raise an important point: the dictator only stays in power as long as they have the trust of the military (to stretch the metaphor to the breaking point). If the chief web person doesn’t have the trust and support of senior execs and leadership than they are going to have a tough go of it.

By: Ellen Behrens

Ellen Behrens — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 15:39:05 +0000

Great post, David! I’ve seen this happen in associations as well, even in small ones where you’d think design control would be easier. But even when you have one person in charge of oversight (let’s say the marketing person) and one in charge of implementation (let’s say the Webmaster), you STILL have the executive staff member, the board of directors, and influential members….. any (or all) of whom can make themselves additional site managers, depending on how able or willing the executive staff member is to keep the site on track.

The worst thing I’ve seen happen is an influential person (on staff or not) who THINKS he or she knows what’s best, pushes the idea forward, and the site starts to morph from what was probably a clean, easily-navigated, usable site into something that’s at best messy and at worse unusable.

So I disagree that “Home pages benefit from benevolent dictators who make sure this critical entry point to their site (yes, home pages still matter even with Google driving people past them) is focused on achieving tangible outcomes that matter the most.” Unless that benevolent dictator is someone who knows what he or she is doing. Otherwise you’ll still get a crappy home page.