Org chart as navigation for a Web site

DO NOT assume that your internal department org chart is a way to organize the site content. In fact, this is rarely the case. Your site visitors don't care how you're organized, and may even find it confusing anyway. Every corporation organizes itself differently and usually reflects the corporate culture. As a Web manager, you will be often coerced into creating content navigation to satisfy department heads, but you must resist. Argue that visitors have goals and objectives when coming to your site (have those handy if they doubt you). By organizing your content along those goals you will improve visitor satisfaction, which will translate in repeat visits, and depending on your business model, increase sales (or donations, or inquiries, etc.).

A good design doesn’t distract the user from getting to the information: It is an enabler

The key word is obviously "enabler". Too often people focus on the esthetics of a design, and although it is important to have an appealing Web layout, all design elements have to have a purpose: Trigger action from the visitor. For e-commerce sites it could be to add items to a shopping cart; for non-profit sites it could be to entice someone to donate to a cause; for a commercial site it could be to download a white paper or a brochure or even better, initiate a business deal. So, ask yourself this simple question: Does the graphic design encourages users to act? If the answer is no, go back to the drawing board, evaluate your user needs and your own business goals and create a design that enables users to act.

Adopting collaboration tools

Collaboration has always been a mainstay in corporations, especially ones that value knowledge sharing and have a distributed workforce. To be able to work on the same documents while not being in the same office generally improves productivity. I say "generally" because it often requires a corporate culture change. Email is usually serving as the means to share documents: People create their documents, save them on their hard drives and send them via email for comments. However, it gets pretty tricky to gather all the comments into one document using this method. Alternatively, in a virtual workplace users post documents online and allow others to leave comments or even make changes to the documents directly. The problem is often that people do not feel they own the document unless they have it in their possession (e.g. hard drive, USB disk, etc.). It takes a change of mentality to adopt collaboration tools, so do not underestimate the costs associated with training users when planning to roll out online document sharing systems.

Web project management... beyond content management?

It seems to me that the focus recently has been a lot of emphasis on content management and very little on Web project management. After many years of managing a very large Web team composed of developers, administrators, content providers and editors, I have come to the realization that the key to success is to treat the Web site as a project. Because of the fast pace of Web publishing, people too often fall in the trap of not planning enough their Web site development. Unfortunately, there are not too many good project management tools to assist Web managers. What we did is use a few copies of Microsoft Project(tm), but this turned out to be an expensive proposition. We found MS Project to be overkill for some things, and not flexible enough for others. In the end we resorted to creating a spreadsheet with a list of projects, assigned name, date start, date finish and a comment field. Not enough, but a start. I recommend to all my clients that they treat their site just as the do other IT-related projects: with discipline and accountability.