·:[ Jason On A Shtick ]:·
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The PR department at our school not only manages the content on our websites, but also controls the technology and design of the sites.  Normally I would not get antsy about this, but consider my beefs with the way things are today:

• Sites are not standards based.  CSS is “sort of” used, but the underpinnings of the sites use file includes and depend on certain paths in order to work.  In other words, if you don’t write .NET code for deployment on Windows/IIS using their directory structure, your stuff won’t work and you  won’t get their standard look and feel.
• Forms written for use by other departments simply have an action of “mailto” instead of saving data to a database, so it is impossible to do anything meaningful with the collected data.
• The home grown content management system is problematic at best.  As with many home grown solutions, it is not easy to manipulate certain details of HTML.  Of course, everyone complains to the IT department about it.
• Our main internal site is used to provide news and notes, but does not contain any type of search or archive functions.  The amount of time that an article stays on the site seems to be arbitrary.  In addition, many news stories are crammed onto one page, so an anchor link for a story may take you to the general vicinity of an article but you still have to search for it within the page.
• The online employee directory does not have pictures for everyone and is rarely updated.  When someone new comes along, what is the first thing you might want to do?  Look at their picture!  Pictures are readily available because we use them on our school ID cards.
• The online student directory is one long, long, long table.  Anchors exist at the top to jump to a letter section by last name and there is a “top” link at the top of each section, but one section may be several scrolls long.  Also, there are no pictures to be had at all.
• There is a “happy birthday” tab that lists faculty and staff birthdays… and it plays an audio file of “Happy Birthday To You!” when you click on it.  Woof.

Add to all this the kick in the shin that really gets to me: somehow, PR gets to decide what e-mails are allowed to be sent “campus wide”.  So there’s a new spyware or phishing e-mail making the rounds and people are falling for it?  Don’t send an e-mail, post it on the internal site instead.  Planning a large migration/upgrade that will affect all users and you need to provide instructions?  Nope – not via e-mail, goes on the internal site instead.  Oh, and it might stay around a few days, it might not.

Don’t get me wrong – lots of e-mail blasts are a bad thing and people will eventually stop reading them if they come too often.  But don’t hoarde my important information just to drive readers to your site.  There is a reason (several actually) that you don’t get a lot of traffic.

Fortunately in my world, he who installs Mailman and writes scripts to keep the faculty/staff/student mailing lists up to date is he who sends e-mail when he wants.  Take no prisoners, comrades!