Other duties as assigned

A day in the life of Liz, the web manager

Liz is the web marketing manager for Occupational Health Inc., a network of insurance companies that merged a few years ago. There are 24 different websites, all centralized at the headquarters office in Pleasant Pastures, Colorado, a suburb between Denver and Boulder that I invented.

Liz was hired last year to manage web marketing responsibilities for the company. Her predecessor, Chad, left the company without much notice. With little documentation, a lot of old file folders and a ton of outdated web content, Liz had to decipher what the processes (spoiler: none) and determine what to replace them with.

How she arrived here

Liz has been managing websites for years. She started off in journalism as a college student, but had always maintained her dad’s restaurant website in high school. With digital booming, she took a more active interest in HTML and taught herself CSS using books, blogs & web videos. She built the college newspaper’s first website, but never thought of herself as a “real developer.” Still, when she got her first job out of college, they hired her more for her web skills than her excellent writing chops.

After working at the Shelltoe Times, a regional alt-weekly, she left for Northwest Central University of Colorado as their web manager before taking the job with OcHI (which is the company’s mandated acronym for itself) in the hopes that the stability and scope of the role would give her more experience than she’d had previously. While it was a bit greater in scope than she’d been accustomed to, her boss expressed her full faith in Liz’s ability to juggle the varied responsibilities with aplomb.

Dealing with “an environment of contributors”

Six months in, Liz was settling in well picking up the mess Chad left behind. Among her accomplishments:

• Implementing a workflow model for contributors to submit content for approval to the website.
• Developed monthly training for offsite employees with publishing rights to the website, providing them with printed materials that would help them remember what to do and her office number for problems.
• Providing her manager with weekly analytics reports during their own weekly check-ins. Her boss Sandi began to share this data with her superiors, which led to Liz having to brief the entire executive team on user experience improvements she planned to implement. They increase the web budget by $5,000 to allow Liz to purchase a suite of tools to improve analytics tracking and begin testing online advertising.

Things are going well, except for the meetings. OcHI has a mantra called “the culture of contributors” where meetings can be interrupted by people who feel they have something valuable to say. It has to be on topic, but that’s determined by whoever is running the meeting. At headquarters, Liz has managed to become part of a marketing committee that has a number of non-marketing administrators on board. It’s during this meeting that website matters get discussed.

In this example, Liz’s team is discussing potential changes to their content management system which dates back to 2005 and has stopped being supported by the vendor, who admonishes OcHI to upgrade to their latest and greatest version. Most people are wondering why Chad never said anything about the CMS being on the wrong version. The in-house IT staff does not have anything to do with the website. It’s managed by the vendor and hosted externally, so their input was never sought until Liz showed up and involved them.

In the most recent meeting, a proposal to spend $125,000 to upgrade to the latest version of the CMS was being considered. Linda from Accounting, decided to ask questions she felt were relevant at this time. Because she’s from accounting, no one felt like she would go too far off the ranch.

They would be wrong.

Linda from Accounting: “Why do we need to make such a big expense? Why isn’t the current version good enough?” she asked.

Liz: “It’s outdated. CMS are constantly being updated. A switch would cost us even more in time and productivity to train everyone.”

Linda from Accounting: “Why do we need the biggest fastest and best? What we have now is working just fine? I just pulled up the website on my phone and it’s really fast! That’s what’s wrong with this generation today. You all want the fastest and best, but don’t want to consider the costs.”

Tony is head of the physical plant and he wondered about this, too. Gretchen, the VP of client services hates the website and doesn’t understand why the marketing department is always talking about Facebook. She sees it as a waste of time. In the end, despite the best efforts of Liz and the people on the committee who supported the upgrade, it was put on hold for the time being.

It would be upgraded seven months later.

Another day in the life of our resident web manager.