Early this year, Smashing Magazine posted an article detailing the 10 Harsh Truths about Websites of Large Organizations. As a designer who has work in both agencies and marketing communications departments, I can attest to the validity of each one of the 10 truths. Here are the ten with our comments:

1. You Need A Separate Web Division: Marketing departments, especially in a corporation setting, are filled with communications specialists whose first reaction is “Make our logo bigger,” and IT is too busy keeping servers and e-mail gateways running. Jeffery Zeldman of Zeldman.com puts it best, “From law firms to libraries, from universities to Fortune 500 companies, the organization’s website almost invariably falls under the domain of the IT Department or the Marketing Department, leading to turf wars and other predictable consequences. While many good (and highly capable) people work in IT and marketing, neither area is ideally suited to craft usable websites or to encourage the blossoming of vital web communities.”
2. Managing Your Website Is A Full-Time Job: “Not only is the website often split between marketing and IT, it is also usually under-resourced.” That’s an understatement of epic proportions. Avoid the problem; Hire a full-time web manager that has some experience or, at the very least, a manger that that the desire and intelligence to learn.
3. Periodic Redesign Is Not Enough: We’ve seen corporate sites that haven’t been updated in 2+ years and sites with strong CMS that no one has time to update. Eventually some exec throws a hissy fit because he was embarrassed by the outdated site. The marketing manager freaks out and every other project grinds to halt while the site is redesigned to fit the executives demands du jour. Once he’s satisfied, everyone goes back to their previous projects and the cycle starts all over again. To avoid this vicious cycle, we recommend that along with a dedicated team, sites are evolved, rather than redesigned. Cameron Moll in his post, Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign, explains this continual investment in your website, allowing it to evolve over time. Not only is this less wasteful, it is also better for users.
4. Your Website Cannot Appeal To Everyone: It is important to be extremely focused about your audience and cater your design and content to it. Does this mean you should ignore your other users? No, your website should be accessible by all and not exclude anybody. However, the website does need to be primarily aimed at a clearly defined audience. If you build a website for everyone, it will appeal to no one.
5. You Are Wasting Money On Social Networking: Social networking is about people engaging with people. Individuals do not want to build relationships with brands and corporations. They want to talk to other people. You are wasting time and money shoveling promos and feeds through a corporate social media account. Instead encourage your employees to start Tweeting and blogging themselves. If the company can’t do that because of control issues, then they don’t truly understand social media and have problems that run far deeper than a online strategy.
6. Your Website Is Not All About You: Probably the most important truth in the list! “Too many organizations ignore their users entirely and base their websites entirely on an organizational perspective. This typically manifests itself in inappropriate design that caters to the managing director’s personal preferences and contains content full of jargon. A website should not pander to the preferences of staff but should rather meet the needs of its users.” We’ve seen too many creative, effective site designs altered and destroyed because an executive attached to the redesign had been with the company for 20+ years and couldn’t (or refused to) see his company from any perspective other than his own.
7. You’re Not Getting Value From Your Web Team: Micro management turns designers into pixel-pushers. “By doing so, you are reducing their role to that of a software operator and wasting the wealth of experience they bring. If you want to get the maximum return on your web team, present it with problems, not solutions.”
8. Design By Committee Brings Death: This one reminds us of Despair Inc.’s poster, MEETINGS, None of us is as dumb as all of us. When it comes to design, committees are the kiss of death often resulting in a design that is flawed because too many people provided input. It lacks a coherent vision and as a result, culminates in a failure to successfully solve the problems the design was intended to solve.
9. A CMS Is Not A Silver Bullet: We use Content Management Systems and love the lowered technical barriers afforded to our clients. But as we tell our clients from the start of every web project: The hardest part is always content. Where we see CMS frameworks fail is, “a CMS may allow content to be easily updated, but it does not ensure that content will be updated or even that the quality of content will be acceptable. Many CMS-based websites still have out-of-date content or poorly written copy. This is because internal processes have not been put in place to support the content contributors.”
10. You Have Too Much Content: Steve Krug, in his book Don’t Make Me Think, encourages website managers to “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” This will reduce the noise level on each page and make the useful content more prominent. And while it’s easy to tell Web writers to cut the fluff, it’s harder to actually do it. Each time a new content contributor joins your team, you must drill them incessantly on the special guidelines for writing for the web. Jakob Nielson’s site useit.com, has an extensive section on writing for the web.

Popularity: 23%