Building your web team

So you’re in charge of the website. You’re likely in Communications and/or Marketing. You’ve reached capacity with your current web team. Perhaps you’ve mainly relied on one or two people to publish most of your content. In fact, you and your staff may have created or edited most of the content so far. You wish you could get more communications people and others to publish some of their work, but no one has time to deal with the peculiarities of your content management system (CMS), so it keeps getting funneled through your web guy (or girl). He has learned to deal with the eccentricities of your CMS – he’s figured out some work-arounds and perhaps entrenched a few or more bad habits into the system. You tend to think of him and his backup as your Web team. Oh, yes, and there is the website host or developer who helps out now and then and your communications people who coordinate updates with the rest of the organization.

And of course, as the Web manager, you’ve learned more than you really wanted to know along the way, but you’ve kept things going pretty well, given what you have to work with. But there are days, when you know that what you really need to get things cooking is a bigger Web team and a better system.

Well, no matter how big or small your site is, your team needs to cover off a number of specific roles when it comes to designing and developing aspects of your existing public site or intranet, or some new web project. You may not have many team members, but among them all, someone better be covering the functions designated to these roles, or something’s going to go missing in action (if it hasn’t already).

With small web project teams, one person may cover many roles to a greater or lesser degree, with more or less competence. The team is usually composed of people on the inside, and some external help. In broad terms there’s the Design team, Technical team, and Content and Marketing team, and someone to manage them all. There’s also a sponsor or a web committee with a high level vision. The diagram above shows you the key roles. Can you identify who covers each of these roles on your team?

If you’re past the implementation phase, then there is less need for some of the technical roles, but if you’re preparing for implementation then you need to make sure all these roles are covered.

To receive a PDF which defines each of the Web Team Roles, please contact us.