Matthew Burpee

Subject: static sites does anyone do it like we do?
From: x
Date: Thu, 03 Sep 2009 11:53:52 -0400
Reply-To: "University and College Webmasters"

Hello colleagues,
I have been trying unsuccessfully for the past several years to move my
school to a CMS. I am back from a summer off from work, during which my
temporary stand-in did little more than manage content, i.e., copy and
paste Word documents into Dreamweaver, with endless back-and-forth
rounds of proofing and editing with faculty members and department heads
(along the lines of, “Can you add a semi-colon to the 3rd sentence in
the 2nd paragraph, right after the word psychology”). Needless to say,
it drove him pretty batty, which has pretty much been the story of my
professional life for the past several years. I got to walk away from
all that for a few short months, but now that I’m getting back into it,
I am realizing anew how completely inefficient and 20th century our web
practices are and preparing to make my case once again for some kind of
CMS. My only argument may be in the end, “No one else does it like we
do, welcome to the 21st century.” We have a half-time webmaster (me),
no dedicated web programmer, and I am pretty much the only one with any
access to our web server because of the support issues (not to mention
the bad coding and poor design/usability issues) we ran into when people
were maintaining their own sites. I do not want to teach people
Dreamweaver and HTML again, which I never should have been doing in the
first place (the pilates instructor wants to post fitness tips, she
shouldn’t need to learn a programming language to do that). I know from
this list how many of you are using CMSes and what kinds, and I’m
continually envious. What I want to know is, does ANY school out there
do it like we do??