University Web Developers

University Web Developers

So, staffing is a big issue here and I was wondering what your staffing situation is like w/ regards to web design/marketing communications. I'll give you an example:

I am the only web person in the Integrated Marketing (Communications) office. We have a part-time publications director/copywriter who is filling in for someone else that is still on staff, but has interim duties elsewhere this year. We have a media relations person and a person that heads up the department.  I can additionally pull from, for input and some development the two web people from IT. So all said and done when it comes to web and social media there is me.

Tags: communications, marketing, staffing, web

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Do you have folks that train people how to write for the web, use the CMS, or other web systems they might have access to?
Not in any official capacity as such, as far as I know.
In our case, we don't have anyone whose "job" it is to train. The academic marketing coordinator helps with the writing for the web and I provide the rest of the training needs.
Just me.
We are a small private institution (around 1300 students). My position ("Web Site Coordinator") has bounced between Marketing and IT. I am currently in the Marketing & Communications department. Prior to adopting a CMS last year I was the only FTE who posted to the websites along with two part-time student assistants.

We split out internal content and placed it into an intranet, folded in our external sites for athletics and the arts center, redesigned our website to match our new branding initiative last year. I oversee the external website. I maintain 125 OUCampus user accounts, hold cms training sessions twice per month plus one-on-one training when needed. I work with others in my department who occasionally help with graphics and some content for the site and who give monthly sessions on topics like writing for the web. I assist departments with posting content, creating website structure. I recently finished building a website for our preschool which is affiliated with the college. I work with the IT people when it comes to server-related issues since I have no experience with hardware.
Our Communications office does not have anyone dedicated to web/new/social media. I am the only person dedicated to that and I am part of IT. In addition I have about 1/4 FTE assistance with back-end programming and web systems maintenance support (e.g. LMS, CMS); and about 1/10 FTE assistance with end-user training. We have 1350 students.
My office (Strategic Communications) falls under University Advancement. We are responsible for university image and branding. Our office also manages the university homepage and 'top tier' pages. Enrollment is 30k+. Each individual college/division at the school has its own webmaster and is completely independent. Central IT's role is primarily systems/server support and maintenance.

We have 3 full time writers, 3 full time graphic designers, 2 production/client coordinators, 1 admin assistant, 1 head boss man and 3 web people with vastly differing skillsets.

We work closely with Public Affairs on many projects. They have 2 writers, 5 editors, 1 archivist, and 1 part-time photographer. They had multiple print publications for many years, but as money dried up their content moved, publication by publication, to the web. With the exception of one slightly more tech-savvy person, none of them have any experience with the web--they're all from traditional print journalism backgrounds. Up until this summer and their guinea pig WCMS-based site rollout, all their content was entered in manually by a person on our web team.

Web Person A is actually in charge of both the web team and the graphic designers and splits his attention between the two teams as manager. He has a strong graphic design background and develops prototypes, wireframes and mockups.

Web Person B is server-side-code-oriented. She is responsible for donation and event forms, is the accessibility and 508 compliance guru, and email marketing. She also oversees our programmer student assistants.

Web Person C is me. I translate mockups to webpages and focus on front-end coding. Until this summer, I usually spent half (or more) of my time posting news releases and Public Affairs content onto the web via lots of table-based templates and copy/pasting, building archive pages by hand and modifying multiple news portals on a daily basis. While not any kind of expert or specialist, I like to think I at least understand usability and web standards. Of our web team I'm the only one that participates in the online highered web community.

Each member of the team has overlapping abilities and skills, but in the last year we've been dividing more job responsibilities along core skillset lines.

Because of the lack of the team's experience in dealing with any kind of dynamic, database-driven web-anything, we usually hire computer science students to do the actual programming around here. Natural turnover is killer and we have had multiple projects stalled for a year before they see completion (if at all).

User testing, formal project management, any real database-driven development, analytics, and usability are nonexistent. Up until I joined two years ago there were only two people doing anything "web"--one of whom spent half his time on print-oriented projects. Progress across campus has been glacially slow and stymied by a decentralized web presence and a general inability to make decisions.

Being a small shop at a small or midsized school can be a great advantage. Big isn't always better.
I work in a Faculty comprised of 5 Schools (Business, Economics, Law, Education and Architecture), and we are the only Faculty in the University to have it's own marketing team. In this team, I am the only web person ('Digital Marketing Coordinator').

Our central marketing unit has a web team of 1 manager and 3 'online consultants' (very basic web dev's), 1 programmer, 1 info architect, 1 graphic designer, 1 web applications programmer, 1 new digital media strategist, 1 new digital media coordinator and thats it. I think we might be getting a new Java guy.

Considering we have something like 1500 websites, we're extremely understaffed. In saying that, our website structure is atrocious. I'd eat my own arm to have a dedicated web dev and programmer in my team!!!!

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