A straw poll for people who look after websites...

[lostcarpark]

Lots of poeple look after different types of websites, whether it's a personal site hosted on something like MySpace, right up to a a corporate e-commerce site clustered across hundreds of servers.

If you find, or have ever found yourself in such a position, I'd like to know what's the one thing about the experience that ticks/ticked you off the most. Could you post a tiny bit about the site in question (no need to identify it unless you want to), your role, how the site is/was maintained, and either the thing that you found really annoying, or something you thought that would have made your life a lot easier.

This sort of ties into something I'm working on. I'm not promising I'll be able to make your life easier, but I'm not saying I won't...

Comments

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Comments like "It would be good if we could put something on the website about that" that are left hanging that vaguely.

No response on requests for wtf needs doing, and then suddenly you get a pile of work and it's urgent and the requester fails to allow for you having a real job and a social life that need to be juggled around volunteer work.

Insistance upon horrid things like blinking text and animated gifs and you're just a code monkey with no say in what is accepted.

These are past experiences. The current sites I maintain voluntarily don't really cause me any issues.

[lostcarpark.livejournal.com]

I can see where you're coming from. Often the technology is easy, but the people are the problem.

I notice you say "voluntarily". I'm interested in professional experiences too.

[hawkida.livejournal.com]

Oh professionally the worst are the clients who want it to look exactly the same on every machine and browser and just can't grasp that web pages aren't even *meant* to do that.

In my last job I'd spend ages getting stuff as the spec required and then they'd go, "Oh, we just want a minor tweak or two" and the tweaks although seemingly small took just as long to code. Then they'd "tweak" it back, or partially back and ask for incremental changes. Basically, the spec was a starting point and it was insane.

Worse was when we were bought by a global firm and given instructions. We'd go "But if we do it like this then x, y and z will happen" and they'd go, "Well, it has to match the spec because that's what the testers will test against. We can log the problems as bugs later." So you'd do insane stuff just to match an insane spec. This varied from calculation problems right down to spelling mistakes. You had to put in the bad spelling in order that it could be passed as identical to what was requested and *then* it could be fixed in the next release.

Then there was the point where I got put on bug fixing and I'd read the bug and say "Well, I don't know what page they were on or what they were trying to do and despite emailing and ringing them they won't talk to me" and my boss would say "Work around that". And then after I failed to work around knowing sod all about the problem *he* would contact the person who raised the bug and because he was senior they would give him all the info and he'd go "See? All you had to do was ask".

I don't think these are really restricted to the web, though.