I was working on an older website and reminded of the secretary who'd been in charge of updating the website telling me it was too difficult to put any content on the site. She said the old site (Wordpress) was too hard. Before I was replaced with another web designer, she said my (Joomla) site was too hard. The company went with another Wordpress site after me, which means her job became (you guessed it) too hard once again. The reason for all of this is simple: websites are not social media, but secretaries in charge of updating websites all around the country think otherwise. This means that website updates are too hard and social media updates are all that most small companies can manage. That's sad, I guess, but it's also food for thought. 

I want my websites to be as easy as social media. I try to design them to be a few clicks and some words, but the social media companies don't want to integrate with websites all that easily, since the goal for those companies is to keep people engaged in their pages, not mine. My clients don't want to have to upload images on Facebook, Twitter, AND a website, but the fact is that images on the website don't get buried under years of other photos and posts. Still, I can't convince most secretaries that the websites I make them are BETTER than social media, so the best I can hope for is an article once in a while as the social media updates occur daily. 

As a web designer, it feels kind of like leading a horse to water in order to watch the horse piss in the pond. I've had clients never, ever log into the website. Never. Then ask for login info or some kind of code integration with some new marketing company or why it's so hard when Facebook is so easy. I suggest they login and watch the tutorial video, but I also have to re-issue passwords from two years earlier because no one ever logged in. 

Or people might ask why my websites can't show PDFs like other websites. Of course, they can, but just like other websites (and probably social media), the PDFs need to be uploaded and displayed properly. It's not super-simple, but I guide people. But instead I just get an angry email that it's not working out. It's too hard. The other web design guy will either lie and promise the world or he'll be dealing with the same secretaries a few years from now. They'll ask for social media or apps or whatever, all of which is too hard. 

Because what it really comes down to is secretaries of the world want web designers of the world to do their jobs for them. It's true. Once a PDF or Word document is finished, they reason, they're jobs are done, and the website ought to automatically figure it out from there. Actually, that's even too much work for some workers, since I've set up Google Drive folders that were created to self-update websites but were deemed too difficult to add documents to. Yes, really. All she had to do is add a document to a folder and the site would be made new once a week, but that was too much work, while the same person probably posted 30 times with photos of various meals and cute things her cats were doing on social media. Not because it's really any easier, but because it was what she wanted to do rather than her job.