Web Teams -- Your Take
December 12, 2003 | 
21 Comments
While reading the WaSP’s great and very informative interview with Todd Dominey something leaped out at me.
He talks about the team that worked on the PGA.com site and obviously they did a really great job, but I was a little taken aback when Todd referred to his Web team as “small.”
Pretty small — three graphic designers, two ColdFusion developers, two creative directors, one editor, one general manager, a handful of writers, and myself. In the days leading up to the launch, we were all pulling 16+ hour days, with the final night before launch finding the web developers staying up all night, drinking Red Bull for breakfast. Everyone on the team has a myriad of talents with very little overlap, so as a group we get a lot done.
Well I’d hope so. ;)
That’s small?! It seems huge to me. I’m not judging or anything I just was surprised that Todd considers a team of 10 people small. At the hospital my team is 5 people. Myself, A Systems Admin/Developer, A Web Developer, A Web Producer and our manager. That’s it and some of the sites we work on are huge and there is a never ending supply of work.
We do get quite a bit of support from IT and Mar/Comm, but I woudn’t consider them a part of our core team.
I’m curious to hear how my readers teams (if any) are set up and what y’all think is a small or large Web team. Also, what do you think would be a perfect Web team?
Please discuss.
Filed under: Web General
Comments
1. Scrivs said:
I thought that was pretty large myself, of course the largest team I was ever around was a team of 6 and that was with 2 contractors.
Posted on December 12, 2003 05:25 PM | #
2. P01 said:
PGA.com seems to be pretty dense in content but since they used a CMS ( and thus didn’t wrote one from scratch ), it seems to be a little large. Nevertheless we don’t know the exact scope and time frame of their intervention.
If Dominey Design can’t handle several contracts at a time, they must have spent 2 months, according to their “Gazette”, which is short for a complete redesign of a site of that scale. It would easily explain why they worked 16+ hours a day.
Posted on December 12, 2003 06:49 PM | #
3. ste said:
My team is really not a team at all - I’m the sole web developer for my department. I can call for help from the editor for editorial/writing purposes, but in terms of design, development, and administration purposes, I’m it. Thankfully, the site isn’t nearly as huge (in every way) as PGA.com, though I’m looking at a complete redevelopment of the site soon, and it will likely take about a year or so to do it right (including switching much of the backend for the interactive bits over to PHP).
(BTW, out of curiousity, is the hospital you work for the same that’s soon going to be the recipient of the many toys that Penny Arcade are collecting for sick kids?)
Posted on December 12, 2003 06:55 PM | #
4. Mike said:
You people with your large teams…..I’m one of one at my hospital, but we’re working on it (hospital benchmarks, may help).
Actually, I’m the one dedicated to the site, but our writers provide press releases and rewrite content, and IT provides servers. I graphic design, program, update, test, our site.
Posted on December 12, 2003 08:51 PM | #
5. Keith said:
Ste - actually we are the hospital mentioned at Penny Arcade. It’s kind of a funny situation that highlights how it works sometimes in Health Care.
I didn’t know anything about that, and neither did any of my team, until yesterday.
You’d think, as the hospitals only Web folks and being part of communications that we’d know about this and be able to publicize it on our site…You’d be wrong.
Oh well, I’m off to Hawaii. I’d imagine one of my teammates will take care of it next week.
Posted on December 12, 2003 09:52 PM | #
6. dunc said:
My shift is 6 people, but we are only responsible for putting new content up. On the dayside we have about 6 people, only 2 or 3 or whom actually work constantly on improving, as opposed to updating, the site. Of course, this is a newspaper, so our aims are slightly different. Our code would give you a heart attack.
Posted on December 12, 2003 10:01 PM | #
7. JMBR said:
I am the creative director for the third largest market research company in the world. I am in charge for all creative (print, web, interactive). My team has one web designer. We have no dedicated content editor (we usually get all content from Mar/com in which I have to “web-itize”) and we have no dedicated programmer (we do have access to them if really needed).
In the last sixth months us two (creative director and web designer) have launched a 100 page corporate website (no CMS), launched a 60 page b2b portal (using the worst CMS that idiot programmers paid for without our consultation), and on Jan 1 I will launch a 150 page intranet with bulletin board, interactive phone list, Macromedia Contribute updatable pages and the site nearly validates XHTML and I have been working on it for two months just in my spare time.
I don’t mean to brag, but I obviously think Dominey’s team is large. With a team like that I’d expect the world. The PGA Championship site is damn good. I think there is a huge difference between in-house/corporate designers than the ad agency/free-lance designer. In that world you can specialize in one area and get work in a team like that if you are really good (like Dominey, he’s amazing). In my line of work though as an in-house designer I have to do it all. I make ads in Quark, interactive Flash portals, intranet sites, internet sites, usability testings, Powerpoint templates for sales support, proposals in Powerpoint, Word and Quark and on and on and on.
Maybe this is why I always feel overwhelmed! It’s also 6:30 am on Saturday morning as I write this. I’m getting ready to start a freelance job! It never ends!!!!
Posted on December 13, 2003 03:43 AM | #
8. dez said:
At my day job (a student funded organisation at one of Melbourne’s biggest Universities), I am currently working with a team of three others on the organisation’s site redesign which could end up being around 100 pages.
We all have other duties of which this redesign is an added duty. Because no one person has responsibility for the overall site, we have had to delegate roles based on interest, skill-set and out of neccessity.
For instance, I manged to sell the team on standards, though my co-workers work almost exclusively with Dreamweaver, so I’ve had to take the lead in design and coding (and some training).
Because we already have full workloads and no extra time has been made available to us to do the redesign, we have to make the time however we can. I do most of my work at home in between freelance jobs and chalk it up to “time-off-in-lieu” (and loss of sleeping hours).
And yes I think Todd’s team was huge but half his luck. Though, working in teams poses its own sets of challenges and can often slow work down unless the team is manged skillfully.
Posted on December 13, 2003 05:51 AM | #
9. Robert Occhialini said:
First, I should say that I am one of the members of the team in question. (I’m one of the two ColdFusion developers mentioned, but my role also extends to SysAdmin, Database work, and various other technical related task.)
From the perspective of the team being ten people, that is not the case on an ongoing basis. The team that relaunched the primary site(pga.com) was comprised of the people mentioned. It was a Death March project, and we wouldn’t have gotten it done in the short timeframe without each and every one of those people. As it was, there were a lot of features we had planned at launch that we didn’t get to finish or deploy. After we re-launched the site, it narrowed down to five dedicated people who do actual work with the site, essentially two folks with a design and UI background, two folks with a server side background, and one full time editorial person. This team works with the day to day content updates, site changes, new projects, and all of the various micro-sites for events that we do. If you take a look around the site, you will get a good idea what the scope of some of these things are. It’s quite a bit of work, believe me:-)
I think however, that the judgement about the size of the team is a matter of perspective to some extent. For the amount of content, events, and various other site related tasks on a site the size of PGA.com, five people is a small team in my opinion. We share our offices with another sports Web property, one that has been very successful and also, I should mention, profitable. I obviously cannot name it, but the development/editorial team on that site is substantially larger than five, and is closer to 35, but that includes project management and marketing folks, and we have neither on our team currently. So, from our perspective, in our corporate space, we are a very small team. We also have our offices in CNN Center, and are in contact with the teams for some of the other Time Warner properties. They are much larger than the previously un-named sports property, and thus are an order of magnitude larger than us.
As far as the size of the “perfect” development/design team goes, anything less than ten is usually great in my experience. Five has been somewhat of a struggle at times for the properties we work with, and it has forced us to have to make compromises that we did not want to make. From the perspective of good team chemistry and the ability to get things done quickly, I would take our team of five over many teams of ten. I would rather have quality than quantity around me.
Posted on December 13, 2003 11:14 AM | #
10. patrick h. lauke said:
in my dayjob as webmaster@salford.ac.uk, i’ve just recently appointed an assistant to deal with most day-to-day simple updates while i can concentrate on larger, more strategic projects. we do get support from IT as well, as you mention keith, but for the most part we’re on our own…
Posted on December 14, 2003 03:12 PM | #
11. Bob said:
I’m a one-man team as well. Designer, coder, developer, tester, etc. I’ve never worked on a web team (or any other design/dev team for that matter) so the entire concept is a bit foreign to me. I did interview for a position on a team once. The interviewer asked me if I preferred to code or design. I asked why, and she explained that their staff was divided into two groups: coders and designers. The designers created the layouts in Photoshop, slice-n-diced them up, and sent them to the coders, who tweaked the HTML around the layouts.
I explained that I had always done both (this was 1999, mind you) and had no preference - it was just a way of life for me to handle both tasks. When she forced me to choose, I chose “design,” to which she promptly stated: “Oh, well - I’m the technical manager. You’ll have to set up an interview with the creative director. He’s out today.”
I never called back.
Posted on December 15, 2003 08:15 AM | #
12. Gilbert Lee said:
It really depends on the project, of course, but I think an small ideal team would have a web designer (who is superfast in HTML), a usability/IA guy (who is also a semi-web designer), a web developer (who is also a DB guy), and a part-time content writer. I think this would be an ideal number - 4. Of course, you’ll have to have some good project requirements written before they go to this team so add another one in there.
Here’s a couple articles I’ve found:
1. Modeling The Creative Organization
2. The Nine Pillars of Successful Web Teams
Posted on December 15, 2003 09:19 AM | #
13. Jason said:
The web team at my Job is 1.5 people.
We have no designer (that falls mostly to me, and I am not a graphics person).
The organization is broken into divisions and each division has their own internal site which they maintain. (Don’t really like it cause there is no uniformity or standars of practicies set other than 508 compliance (which could use some work) BUT being that there are only 1.5 web guys it really gives us little to no choice)
We have admins but the websever and coldfusion server pretty much sit there and run, the admins are busy with other projects and the web server doesn’t require much attention so long as it runs.
So that leaves two programmers to work on web based programs. I am only really working on that half of the time as I work for one of the other divisions mainting their site (the only internal site that adheres to web standards mind you)
We would so love to have more people to work on web apps and more. The site could use an overhaul in the worst way.
But as it stands 1.5 of us dont have the time.
Posted on December 15, 2003 12:46 PM | #
14. william said:
dude, it’s not the size of the ship, but the motion of the ocean!
i couldn’t help but being crass here, but considereing the audience and deadline of a project ought to greatly determine the size of the team.
i say, “big up” to the “little” team that could…and did.
Posted on December 16, 2003 02:37 AM | #
15. Alex said:
Being the young webdesigner I am, I have not yet had the chance to work in a team. I did do a website with a friend once, but that cannot really be considered a team, can it? Anyway, 10 people really doesn’t sound like that much to me. I’m not very expeirenced, but I know that I could easily rally up a lot more then 10 friends to work on a project.
Posted on December 16, 2003 09:09 PM | #
16. patrick h. lauke said:
alex, sorry to be blunt, but we’re not talking about a bunch of friends being rallied up. we’re talking about people being employed, payed, by a company to work. especially in the light of economic downturn in the post-dot-com era, this makes one wonder…
Posted on December 17, 2003 03:47 AM | #
17. Robert Occhialini said:
For review, there are not ten of us.
Posted on December 17, 2003 12:56 PM | #
18. Ian Pitts said:
For the scope and exposure of the PGA site I don’t see 10 individuals during tight-deadline development small at all.
I am the Internet Marketing Manager (READ: webmaster, lead designer/developer, creative director) of a team of 3. I recently hired a web designer to join myself and a developer and desperately needed the additional help. Even with the extra help, we’re completely swamped. We’re feeling the pressure right now with our own tight-timeframe project: a complete corporate site redesign using XHTML/CSS by April 1.
Posted on December 18, 2003 06:02 PM | #
19. Keith said:
Aloha from Kona! Nice little discussion we’ve got here.
Robert - I hope you didn’t see my post as a judgment of any kind. I’ve worked on both small (5 people) and large (15+ people) web teams and they both work fine. I’ve also worked on quite a few sites solo. There are pros and cons to every team makeup.
It’s just that I consider anything more than say 6-7 people to be a pretty big team. That says nothing about the quality of work or anything, just the actual number of people.
Ian - I think you’re well staffed for the redesign you’re talking about. When it comes to the development end at least you’ll be surprised at how quickly you can knock that out as soon as you have your xthml+css templates worked out and from there changes are usually a breeze.
A quality site can be done by as little as one person, if that person has the timeframe, the skill, the goals and everything else he or she needs to succeed.
The PGA site is one of the best sites around and big props should go out to that whole team – regardless of size.
Posted on December 18, 2003 06:16 PM | #
20. Robert Occhialini said:
Keith, I didn’t take your post as a judgement at all, but I wanted to make sure that everyone had accurate information about the team itself beyond what Todd said in the interview. In addition, I was a regular reader f your site prior to this discussion, and was happy to join in on something I actually know quite a bit about:-)
Posted on December 19, 2003 05:43 AM | #
21. Miao said:
I agree.
Posted on March 13, 2004 07:36 PM | #
Comments are now closed