What’s a web magician?

People who do a little bit of everything by necessity

There are lots of articles about designers and developers. We devote entire conferences to people who do content strategy now and there whole books about UX strategy, service design thinking and product management, but very little ink dedicated to the doers who make everybody look smart when the content actually goes where it belongs.

So I did a whole talk (see slides) about a persona I called Liz who is a web manager at an insurance company. Liz is also the marketing manager, responsible for design & anything else they need from her that’s relatively creative outside of physically printing the advertisements herself. I’ve already written about my reaction to Liz after Now What Conference, but the reaction I received made me feel like we needed to spend a lot of time walking in the shoes of web managers.

What does a web manager do?

For all of the talk about responsive, choosing a content management system and what photos will go in what order on the site, somebody actually has to manage the website. There is no real standardized formula for how many web managers you need in a particular entity.

Some will outsource the function entirely, others will hire one person until they physically cannot do anything more and increasingly, there are places that dedicate entire departments to the digital medium; usually as a function of marketing or IT, the two logical places you’d expect a website to live besides an independent digital division.

Keeping in mind that no two roles are the same, here are some fairly consistent capabilities:

• Train web content authors around the organization.
• Copy edit content from stakeholders.
• Manage the content management system including troubleshooting issues, user permissions & improvements.
• Determine the content strategy and voice of the entire website, developing a style guide if necessary.
• Implement or manage a search engine optimization program and ensure content is optimized for SEO.
• Set KPIs and site benchmarks for traffic and ensure they are met.
• Keep current on market trends, research & new tools as they are created.
• Upgrade your Defense Against Dark Arts courses at Hogwarts online (Okay, I made this one up.)

How did we get here?

For years, I’ve known the plight of people toiling in obscurity in jobs you don’t know exist unless you work with them. Leaders think about strategy, about tactics and planning, but I am fond of asking a simple question whenever we talk about governance.

“How many people in your organization could tell me how to get content from their hands to the website?”

Half the time, this question is met with blank stares.

Digital is sexy. The proliferation of marketing technology demands a workforce that can leverage it to benefit organizations. The charitable view sees the world as a place that has more noise. As we become more connected, the noise gets louder and it’s harder to stand out. Every day, millions of people miss out on services, products & individuals they need in their lives because what they needed never reached their radar. The better we design our processes, platforms & tactics to remove those barriers, the more people get helped.

The less benevolent view is the cost of marketing has gone down. There are more places to spend, but you can do a lot more now for less than you could twenty years ago. Conflating digital practice with marketing means you can justify those spendy marketing budgets in a time of austerity for many organizations. This explains why every few months, Harvard Business Review is trying to sell me on hot new trends in digital marketing. (What’s a Chief Marketing Technologist?)

The web manager is just an outgrowth of old webmaster of yore, the jack-of-all trades tech person who managed the website, email servers and whatever else that was plausibly technical within an organization.

Look, if you’re in some big building somewhere with tons of people supporting the website none of what I’m going to be writing about is for you. It doesn’t mean you can’t understand how the other half lives.

There are millions of web users who work in understaffed organizations, managed by a diverse array of ragtag web practitioners who keep the lights on. To their organizations, they are often the true rockstars despite you never meeting them at a conference.