My Webdom for an FTE

ME: So how’s that web editor position approval coming?
CLIENT: Oh, I still don’t have anyone. No dollars yet.
ME: Common, really. In fact, some of our clients have asked to outsource all of their editorial work to us long-term.
CLIENT: Sigh. I was hoping to use that new position to teach some of our people to write complete sentences.

Nothing produces head nodding more quickly than a conversation about staffing. Or, more appropriately, understaffing for the web within colleges and universities. Indeed, every year around budget time, our clients wrestle with the mentality among powers-that-be that their web presence is a capital expense, that content is free and easy, and that websites maintain themselves.

Was an era (small era) that large institutions got by on one web editor and one technical person managing the entire public site. Now, the core team we recommend is four to five times that size to account for editorial, design, training, statistics analysis, etc.—all the functions that don’t go away, but instead, increase, after a big, CMS-driven, site relaunch. The latest must-have: a rich media producer/editor.

I’ve used Shane Diffily’s terrific article about web staffing as a touchpoint in building the case for more staff for our clients. And from our own experience, we’ve found that each page of content on your site takes three hours to produce, roughly 15 minutes to build out, and an hour each year to update and maintain. And then there’s the project management …