Has the time come for a Chief Content Officer?

Big companies have big websites. As a website design & development company we know that’s just the way it is. Far too often, these big websites tend to grow like weeds with content popping up wherever it happens to land on the site. Add a little politics and everyone from every division within the company wants something on the home page, which they then give to the “webmaster” who is always the lowest person in the pecking order and therefore always has to comply.

Kirk website design & development gets involved when someone far above the website content mess sees the 200 items on their home page and demands that it be fixed. Before meeting with the 20 or so people who were “in charge” of their website, we were asked to have a private meeting with an EVP who governed the entire group. He said, “You’re going to meet with a lot of people today. Take lots of notes and listen to everything they have to say,” he said. “But I’m the only one whose opinion counts . You’re the one who has to fix the site. They’re the ones who wrecked it.”

We had our instructions. We did a great design, but most of our work consisted of taking just about everything off the home page and making sure the design meant that it would be tough to put stuff back on.

That was several years ago. Politically nothing had changed. Go to the once clear, well-designed site created by our website design & development company and you can tell that the same old people were submitting the same old stuff to a webmaster who didn’t have the authority to say “no.”

It won’t be long until they turn to us, or another website design & development company to fix their site again.