The six elements your business needs to create a successful website management program
Tenrec is a web development and website management company that was started in San Francisco in 1997, spent 15 years headquartered in downtown Portland, OR, and then three years (since March 2020) as a fully remote enterprise. We are currently a team of 10-15 web professionals living in seven different states and three countries.
Over the past two and a half decades we have worked on all kinds of projects for all types of companies, from sole proprietor websites to an intranet project for a Fortune 50 financial services company.
In 2007 we decided to shift our focus from designing and building websites to managing and maintaining websites and online applications. While we still design and build, our primary focus is on making existing websites perform better. Hence our tagline: “Your Website, Only Better.”
You can learn more about how we work with our clients here: Website Management and Tenrec.
Website management encompasses the diverse set of services required to keep a website and other online resources up-to-date, secure and performing optimally. It is also more than just a list of tasks and procedures. Website management is a multi-faceted area of operations that affects almost every business area, including marketing, IT, HR and finance.
Too often businesses relegate their website(s) to be the exclusive purview of their marketing department or a combination of marketing and IT. But high-performing website management programs are led by an organization’s top executives with a mandate to keep the website aligned with the organization’s strategic goals and objectives.
Website management programs can be broken down into the following focus areas: Planning and Leadership, People, Technology, Tools, Processes and Budget. Each of these areas plays a vital role in sustaining a successful website management program.
At Tenrec, we feel that planning and leadership is the most important focus area for every business website. A website is the primary portal through which the public interacts with an organization. And the success of a website communicating an organization’s brand, culture, priorities, products and services directly correlates to the involvement of its leaders.
People, i.e. the website management team, is the next most important focus area. There are several roles and skill sets required to manage a successful website. Building a team to cover them all is critical.
The technology stack that is selected to host, build and manage a website has a broad impact on how it performs and whether it meets an organization’s long term goals. Additionally, the technology and team must be well-aligned to be effective.
The tools and processes used to manage a site are equal parts of the engine that powers the day-to-day operations of a website management program. Both require attention and care to fit an organization’s needs.
Lastly, your budget is going to set limits on what you can do with your website and how you do it, both now and into the future. But don’t let your budget limit your vision when exploring ideas and opportunities for your website and its management program. Instead, use your budget after the planning work to help you prioritize those ideas and opportunities.
This article provides a high level overview of the different types of services included in a robust website management program. Our goal is to sketch out a roadmap, of sorts, that will help you take stock of what you and your team are doing right when it comes to managing your company’s website and what you may be missing.
The intended audience for this article is leaders at businesses with $10M-100M in annual revenue. But we hope this information will be useful to a wide range of business owners, marketers and website management team members.
Website management can be broken down along many different axes. For this article, we’ve broken it down into the following focus areas.
Each of these areas is an important piece of a website management program but some are more important than others. We’ve sorted the list so that it reads from what we feel are the most important areas to least important. In other words, we believe that Planning and Leadership is the most important focus area when building a successful website management program, then people, technology, tools, processes and budget.
Let’s dive in.
By now there should be no question in your mind that a website is a must-have for any serious business. And for larger professional enterprises, those with multiple locations and service areas, websites are the central components of their public image and digital marketing programs.
Market conditions change. Challenges and opportunities come and go. Every organization evolves as a response to these changes. And an organization’s website needs to evolve in tandem. New initiatives, new products and services, changes to a business model or brand, job openings, all should be reflected on a business’ website. But defining, preparing and publishing these changes can take anywhere from a few days to a year or more. So as these decisions are made by a business’ leaders, the changes they affect need to be incorporated into the website and digital marketing programs. That leadership and advanced planning is critical to keeping a website aligned with strategy and operations.
As the cornerstone of a business’ online presence, a website needs to be aligned with that business’ objectives and marketing strategy. No clothing merchant would send out last year’s catalog to its customers before Christmas. But any number of businesses have out-of-date content, branding and images on their websites.
At Tenrec we have been managing business websites for over 20 years and couldn’t count the number of times that we have found this leadership to be absent at established, thriving businesses, even today. We can’t stress it enough. A business’ leaders need to be directing the planning and management of that organization’s website and digital marketing program to keep them strategically and tactically aligned with the business’ objectives.
Creating alignment between your organization and your website requires planning and proactive leadership. Executive leadership that doesn’t have the capacity (or that lacks the will) to create and maintain that alignment is going to get a lower return on investment from their website every time.
A business website provides a steady stream of data and insights to its managers informing them on content performance, audience engagement and customer behavior. But what data from that stream is meaningful? What should you be watching and measuring?
The goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) of a website should be defined by an organization’s leaders and should reflect the organization’s strategic plan and objectives. Without this guidance, the process of gathering data, measuring results and developing next steps from the data becomes meaningless. There is simply too much data and too many possible next steps for decisions to be made.
In the context of websites and website management, technology is a many-layered thing. Technology encompasses the website’s hosting infrastructure, the website code, the content management system and any number of 3rd party systems, tools or extensions integrated with a website. Managing this technology is an important and ongoing concern.
The nature of web technology is one of constant flux. The software your website is using will need to be upgraded in a year or less. The hardware hosting your website will need to be replaced or upgraded in a year or two. And, if your business is growing, the entire architecture of your website’s infrastructure may need to be scaled or rebuilt as sales and site traffic increase.
Keeping software and hardware systems up-to-date and optimized will help to ensure that your website continues to perform its critical business functions. Additionally, maintaining these systems will keep your website and data secure. Security should be a top concern for every business but it’s especially important for those companies that are required to comply with frameworks such as PCI DSS, GDPR, CPRA and other data protection laws.
Depending on the size and nature of your website, the methods for managing the technology will be different. A small, regional business may choose to take its website offline during late night or weekend hours for servicing. But a global ecommerce website that needs to be up 24/7 will have complex procedures and processes for making similar updates.
Today’s business websites are integrated with disparate data sources and third party systems, such as Saas applications, PIMs, and HR resources. Part of managing the technology running your website is maintaining these integrations. This entails monitoring the flow of data, updating and testing security protocols and performing other maintenance tasks to keep those integrations up to date.
If there were such a thing as a physical toolbox for a website management team, it would be filled with tools of all kinds of shapes and sizes, from browser extensions that allow you to make modifications to the webpage your browser is rendering to Saas software that can conduct automated, multi-step tests on a website with screenshots to document the result.
Finding the right tools for your team is a project by itself. On one hand you want your team to explore all the tools available that will help them do their job. On the other hand, you need your team to be efficient and if everyone is using different tools, they’ll be anything but.
As you might expect, a hybrid approach will give you the best results. For critical functions, such as project management, communication, design collaboration and code management, standardize on the tools that you all feel work best. Then, for everything else, encourage your team to find what works best for them and to experiment with new offerings. And provide a forum where everyone can share the new tools they’re using or tips for getting the most out of the tools you’re all using.
At Tenrec, we’ve standardized our teams website management toolbox with these offerings:
Other tools we use run the gamut from security testing software to domain name management to browser extensions. These include:
Whether you’re managing one website or a dozen, there are going to be a number of tasks that you undertake on some kind of schedule. Adding new content, running performance tests, analyzing site traffic, updating software. Some of these tasks you or your team will do often enough that they become rote. Other tasks you’ll perform once a year or once every five years. All of them should be documented and shared with the team. This is where defining and managing processes comes in.
Without defined processes for the myriad of tasks that make up website management, it quickly becomes a slog. No matter what size your organization is or what your role is in managing its website, building and maintaining a library of processes is going to increase efficiency and improve results.
The good news is that you can find some version of just about every website management process on the Web. Google the process you’re trying to define, crib a few versions of it from the search results, then build your version. Because every website is unique, you will have to customize just about every process to meet your specific needs.
Processes and tools can be considered opposite sides of the same coin. In some cases you’ll have a task to perform and you’ll create a step-by-step process for that task using one or more tools that fulfill your needs. In other cases, you’ll start by finding a tool that performs one or more tasks and you’ll build a process to fit that tool. Both approaches can work well and emphasize how tools and processes are hand and glove.
Budget is a bit of a double-edge sword. On one hand, you could say it is the most important focus area because without adequate money or resources, nothing else would be possible. But, on the other hand, budget is budget. You have what you have and that doesn’t change the scope of what you should be doing to successfully manage your website. For that reason we put budget last on this list of focus areas. As you develop your site management plan, it’s best to consider all your options for success with an open mind. Then, as you work on implementing and prioritizing your plan, let your budget limitations factor into those decisions.
For a company with a very limited budget, the challenge is going to be how to spend those resources wisely. In that scenario, it’s absolutely imperative that the organization’s leaders are directly involved in planning and executing. They can’t afford to waste budget on poorly designed website efforts that need to be rolled back. They may also need to hire team members that can fulfill two or more roles on the website management roster, possibly as part time employees or contractors. And their technology decisions may tend toward open-source and less expensive solutions. And their tools and processes will likely be limited but all the more important as drivers of efficiency.
For an organization with a larger budget the challenges will be different. Even the most well-funded website management program will have challenges deciding how to use those resources. If a business is able to fund a robust digital marketing program, the budgeting of money, time and personnel should be determined by the results that organization needs to realize.
Here is an example, loosely based on one of Tenrec’s client engagements, that illustrates how budgeting can play out:
The leadership of a global professional services firm has found that their current website platform doesn’t meet their needs. It’s too inflexible and changes are taking too long to implement. They need a more agile solution and one that they can manage internally, with some help from an outside team. They don’t need a new design.
The firm hires an outside consultant to help them analyze their needs, goals and budget to determine the best path forward. Together, based on that analysis, they review and select the next platform. The firm plans to hire an outside team to re-platform the site. They also plan to train internal team members on managing the new system and its content. The firm determines that it won’t use internal resources to manage security, software updates and other technical aspects of the site’s backend so plans to hire an outside agency for those services. Resources and budget are then allocated for executing the plan over a five year period.
Because this organization wasn’t budget restrained, the plan was defined by the results they needed to achieve. Where costs were found to exceed their budget, the plan was adjusted and cuts were made. If projected costs had been lower than anticipated, additional initiatives, such as a search engine marketing campaign or marketing automation effort, might have been added to enhance the effort.
The important takeaway is that starting to define your website management program with a budget in place will limit your ability to see the opportunities that are available. Instead, create a comprehensive plan that is designed to meet your organization’s goals and KPI’s. Then craft that plan to meet your budget constraints, prioritizing the highest value items and deprioritizing lower value items that can be added back into your program at a later date.
We hope that this article has given you an understanding and appreciation for the discipline of website management. Even though the Web is over 25 years old, many businesses still have a disjointed relationship with their online presence. In our experience, that lack of alignment leads to wasted resources and suboptimal results both in terms of the website and elsewhere in an organization. Taking a more holistic approach to website management, one defined by a company’s leaders and maintained collaboratively across internal departments, with the right team, tools and processes, and with a right-sized budget, is how a company can achieve its desired results and realize long-term success.
In future posts, we’ll discuss some of the specific areas of website management such as maintaining security on a business website and selecting the right content management system for your business.
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