The Vintage Reader

Here's an example of when your web site has stopped being an asset: when you're a property manager and your web site has lots of properties listed... but when someone calls about them, they're all leased. And you don't have any other listings. At all.

And you get all "Well, just keep checking the web site, because I KEEP IT UPDATED ALL THE TIME" on callers. Because, well, you obviously DON'T keep it updated all the time.

Actually, outdatedness the thing that bothers me most about web sites, even though I myself have been responsible for approximately 5% of all obsolete web sites, due to projects that I started and left that were never maintained and never destroyed.

For example, once upon a time, back in 2000 when the web was all shiny and pretty and everybody wanted to be a part of it, I designed and developed a web site for my neighborhood association, in collaboration with a committee that was far too large, but what are you going to do with a volunteer organization, anyway? Tell people they can't be on the committee? So we had people who thought the web site should consist of the bylaws of the organization, the history of the organization, and a couple of pictures of the neighborhood's Frank Lloyd Wright houses, facing off against the people who wanted a bulletin board for current and former residents to connect with each other, a community calendar, and the history of the neighborhood, with lots of photos of neighborhood events and cute kids having fun at the nearby park. All of that led to some lively meetings, interesting discussions, and in one case, my throwing a bottle cap at a fellow board member. Finally, compromises were reached, hurt feelings were soothed, and bottle cap injuries were healed. We agreed on a design and I put it together and it launched to great fanfare. One board member actually said "This is a dream come true!" (To which I replied, "Dude, you need to dream bigger.")

A few years later, when it needed to be updated, we would have meetings that went like this:

VINTAGE READER: We need to update the web site.

CANTANKEROUS COMMITTEE MEMBER WHO DOESN'T EVEN LIVE IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD ANYMORE BUT IS STILL PART OF THE ASSOCIATION: But what are we going to do about backing up the office computers?

VINTAGE READER: We can schedule a meeting to talk about office computer issues, but right now we need to talk about updating the web site.

LONGTIME COMMITTEE MEMBER WHO LIKES TO DISCUSS THINGS AT LENGTH: If we wrote a batch file that would automatically back up each of the office computers and then record the stats to an Oracle database hosted remotely, we could shmid to the shmop and everything would sync.

CCMWDELITNABISPOFA: But what will we do with My Documents? The secretaries are SUPPOSED to store all their data there, but they keep MAKING NEW FOLDERS and we can't BACK THEM UP.

LCMWLTDTAL: Oh, I see. Well, we could create an algorithm that would predict what they'll name those folders, and then alter the batch file accordingly.

VINTAGE READER: <pounds head on table>

And so the web site remained unchanged, and eventually I left the association board and the web site committee. And then in 2005 they finally got some poor sucker to take it over, and he pressured me for about a week to hand over the files because he wanted to get started on the redesign ASAP (he was calling in consultants and all kinds of things), and I sent him the files on CD (he didn't trust email attachments, IIRC), heaved a sigh of relief, and figuratively washed my hands of it.

And the web site remained unchanged. It's still there, exactly as I left it in 2003, moldering away with sliced-and-diced images (in a table, of course) and, I'm pretty sure, the roster of board members from 2004.

So I understand how this kind of thing happens. In this case, it's not a big deal; it's mostly just there to show off how pretty our neighborhood is. But honestly, if you're going to use the Internet for marketing purposes, be sure it's bringing customers in instead of driving them away.