Who Decides What Goes on the Website This Year

Everyone, or nobody

In many small businesses the website has no owner. Several people change it, each in their own corner, or nobody touches it at all.

The owner rewrites the home page when an idea strikes. The office manager updates prices when someone remembers. A relative who built the site years ago still has the password and fixes whatever breaks.

Either way the result is the same: pages that contradict each other, a form nobody has tested, and customers who get a different answer depending on where they look.

Most offices reopen today after the holidays, which makes this a sensible morning to settle who does what.

What drifts when nobody owns it

• Hours and holiday closures left over from a season that has passed.
• Two prices for one thing, one on a page and one in an old PDF.
• A contact form still sending to someone who has left.
• Pages nobody remembers adding, still turning up in search results.
• Renewal notices for the domain and hosting going to a dead address.
• Software updates nobody runs, because everyone assumes someone else does.

The second is the one customers notice first. Faced with two prices, a visitor does not pick one with confidence; they phone to ask, or go elsewhere.

Three jobs, three names

The fix is not one person doing everything. It is three jobs, each with a name beside it.

One person decides what the website says and promises. One person makes every change. One person checks the live site on a schedule and reports what is wrong.

In a five-person business that may be two staff and the web company. What matters is that everyone knows who holds each job, because it is written down.

The one who decides

The decider approves anything that commits the business: services, prices, hours, guarantees, staff photographs and announcements. Usually that is the owner, or a manager who can set prices.

Others suggest; the decider says yes or no, and when.

Their most neglected job is deciding what comes off. Old offers and discontinued services stay up because removing them was never anyone's decision.

The one who edits

Every change goes through one person, from a written request: an email saying which page, what it should say, and who approved it.

That keeps one version of each fact and a record of who changed what. Two people editing the same page from memory is how a site ends up with two prices.

The editor handles text and photographs. Anything touching layout, forms, plugins or code goes to whoever maintains the site professionally, so a small edit does not break something larger.

The one who checks

Once a month the checker looks at the live site as a customer would: phone number, hours, prices, the home page, and the whole site on a phone.

They send a test enquiry through every form and confirm it arrives. In January they also check the copyright year at the foot of each page.

The checker should not be the editor. Whoever made a change is the worst person to spot what it broke, because they see what they meant to write.

A worked example

A school uniform supplier with a shop in a light industrial unit sells blazers, kilts, polo shirts and sports kit for a dozen independent schools, in person and through an order form for each school.

Three people changed its website. The owner rewrote the banner, the office manager updated price lists, and the owner's son, who built the site at university, fixed whatever broke.

Last August, in the busiest fortnight of the year, one school's page showed one price for the blazer and its printable order form another. The fitting dates on the home page were the previous year's.

Nobody had been careless. Each had changed their own part, and nobody had looked at the whole site the way a parent would.

Now the owner approves each school's page before the season, the office manager makes every change from a list, and the web company checks the live site monthly and tests every order form in July.

The son handed over his logins, and the accounts moved to an address at the business.

Accounts and the email behind each

Behind every website sit accounts: the domain registrar, the hosting, the site's own login, Google My Business, Analytics, Webmaster Tools, the Facebook page and the email service.

Each is tied to an email address, and whoever holds that address controls it: often the relative who set it up, or someone who has since left.

Move each one to an address at the business that the decider can always reach. A login that only one person can reset is, for practical purposes, that person's property.

List the accounts on the page where the three names are written, with the email each uses and when each renews. Keep the passwords separately and securely, and note where.

Where your web company fits

A web company can hold one or two of the jobs: the editor for anything beyond text, and a checker who sees the site with fresh eyes.

It cannot be the decider, because it cannot know when prices change, which service is being dropped, or that the shop closes early on Fridays from March. Decisions stay inside the business.

The counter-case

A business of one cannot split the jobs. The owner decides, edits and checks, and the written page matters less.

Even then, put the checks in a calendar and arrange a second pair of eyes a few times a year, since nobody reliably spots their own mistakes.

A site that rarely changes needs an editor only now and then, but it still needs a checker: forms, renewals and software age whether or not anyone edits a page.

For everyone else: three jobs, three names, written down today.

On the first working day

1. Name the decider for everything the site promises.
2. Name one editor and send every change through them.
3. Name a checker who is not the editor.
4. List every account and the email it uses.
5. Move each account to an address at the business.
6. Book the monthly check in a shared calendar.
7. Write it all on one page.

Step four is the one most businesses cannot finish on the first try, and it matters most when someone leaves. An account nobody can log in to cannot be changed by anyone.

An hour today settles questions that otherwise get argued about in the busy season, when nobody has time for them.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.