Is every big company's Web site totally contentious and controversial?

[brawta]

I work for a big company, about a billion dollars of annual revenue per year and around 3400 employees on a site that operates in 9 languages. The site is solid, large and gets very high amounts of traffic. But our Web site is so contentions, causes political battles up and down the food chain and causes people to get very vocal about their complaints. I am wondering if it is a common occurrance. Does every big company's big web have a lot of "chef's" in the kitchen and only about 5-7 actual developers/designers? Is it non-stop angling for coverage on the home page? Is it a constant struggle to balance the needs of the users vs the voice of the loudest a-type personality?

And who owns the site? Marketing? IT? Sales?

[JPnyc]

Not really sure I fully understand what you're asking here. Speaking for our sites, they're owned by the company and there's a chain of command involved, as with any company. The only person with absolute say over them is the CEO, I suppose. The forums are under my jurisdiction, but I still answer to the editor-in-chief, and the site editors also have say, as well as answering to the editor-in-chief, themselves.

The designers and developers also answer to the editor-in-chief.

Regarding controversy, there are users occasionally that are discontented with one thing or another but one generally aims to please the largest group possible, within the company's business requirements. Does that help at all? If not, ask a more specific question and I'll try to answer.

[brawta]

Thanks for the response.

I guess what I am trying to do is get an idea if the typical Web developer sees as much conflict regarding the Web site that they work on as I do. Also if they are as busy. I sort of feel like I am always at the epicenter of some sort of enormous, explosive debate or argument over the Web site. And as And I can't tell sometimes if it is just my personality or if it is the place I work. There is just a lot of negative energy abound here. It is troubling. Wondering if it is an industry issue or....mine.

[JPnyc]

Well in our company here, I would have to say no, we don't. Like any large company we have our little struggles but for the largest part, we work as a team without conflict. It's a pretty good situation here. I'm not saying we never have differences of opinion in how a site should be deployed or designed but they're tame and not that frequent. I'm not sure what kinds of tumult you're experiencing. I mean, I deal with user issues on all the company forums, and I do get complaints but considering the number of users we have across 30 forums, they're fairly small in number.

[Zipline]

Well from a different angle, as an external developer who has worked with several larger companies I have found that generally there is a problem. Sometimes it is a bigger problem but generally every department feels their content is somehow the most important and deserves more pages than the rest of the departments or the biggest section of the homepage. I once worked with a larger metropolitan library system. They had several libraries all over the city and each library wanted to be featured on the homepage, each department wanted a spot on the homepage and what they ended up with was a giant mess, with a calendar, events, booklists, featured items, multiple hour listings, and several other things crammed into a small limited section. Overall, this made the site far less usable for the customer but since they had nobody calling the shots internally I was unable to convince them otherwise.

In another case, I worked to help a medium sized private college renovate their website. The college had the exact same problem, each department felt they were the most important in the college and their program should have a direct link on the homepage. They also made several other demands, which would have degraded the usability of the site. I decided to have the college setup a committee of professors, students, and administration to approve ideas so that there was a governing body. Although this was inefficient time wise, we ended up with a higher quality product because the committee as a whole knew what was the most important to be included and it prevented the most vocal departments from driving the website.

The important thing is to make sure that the website provides the information the visitor needs as efficiently as possible. Depending on the nature of the site this could vary greatly. It is nice to have someone or a group who knows the company and its customers to help organize the content and site flow. So basically in my experience larger organizations and companies are like that. Everyone believes what they’re doing is the most important task in the company… but in reality a company selling clothing probably doesn’t need a giant link to the accounting department on the homepage even though they’re important to the company!