But it also reminded me of the problems that many corporate websites face. By "corporate" I don't mean business websites, but those expressing the views of groups and organizations of all kinds.
I ran two workshops on writing for the web, and in both I heard some familiar complaints.
In some cases, a union local's website was run by whoever had some technical skills and the willingness to do the job with minimal funding and support. It got updated when the volunteer had the time, and when the local's executive had something to say. That executive, however, had little interest in the web as a serious medium of communication, so the volunteers felt frustrated at how little they could do.
In some cases, a national union's website had no national home page—only regional pages. One such union didn't even have its president's face and voice to pull the regions together: Land on your regional home page and you got a couple of news items about current issues or demonstrations.
Unions of professionals weren't much better, and offered little reason for their members to log in and use the resources on their websites. Businesses now routinely offer a blog by their CEO or some other senior spokesperson. But such an idea is dangerously radical among unions of professionals.
People in these workshops sounded a lot like the earliest webwriters I heard from when I was writing the first edition of Writing for the Web, back in the late 1990s. In those days, the field was very new and no one knew quite how it worked. So you could understand the ignorance of the senior managers.
That excuse no longer applies. We have over 15 years of experience in this medium, and even the senior managers use the web for hours every day. If they don't understand the importance of good content—and the need to pay for it—they're creating more problems than solutions for their organizations.
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