Hi- I’m a newcomer to this forum and joined to pose the above question to members.
Obviously, web pages and webmaster responsibilities can vary so dramatically that it’s impossible to truly quantify or establish a metric that we can measure as "too much" work to manage… but just as obvious- there’s a finite amount of work and responsibility that any one person can handle.
I’m a webmaster for a school at a large university and although the faculty/staff that I support are great people, they have an insatiable appetite for more, more, more. I’m solely responsible for hundreds of basic pages, but also dozens and dozens of very complicated pages that interact with databases and have lots of moving parts. I’m also responsible for server administration, PHP programming, CSS design, graphic design, Flash programming, AJAX programming, MySQL database design and maintenance, user support, web security, online calendars, etc., etc.
In the last 9 months, I’ve redesigned the entire site and added on numerous features that require intensive programming that interact with databases and I have a steady backlog that extends at least two months into the future… so I’m constantly adding more pages/features that I first have to create and then have to maintain them along with all the other existing content/features.
At some point, the sheer amount of web work I’ve built will exceed my ability to maintain it. Furthermore, I am experiencing developer fatigue because I have literally been in constant development for 9 months and there’s no end in sight. As a one-man team, it’s a real challenge that all of this falls on my shoulders. I’ve been with the university for 18 months and the amount and complexity of the site has easily risen 10-fold.
Have any of you run into this & if so how did you handle it? Any insight is appreciated.