: Should Marketing departments have basic HTML skills? Working within an organisation as part of the in-house site development team, a lot of my team's throughput is driven by the colouring-in (marketing)
Working within an organisation as part of the in-house site development team, a lot of my team's throughput is driven by the colouring-in (marketing) department. It is their responsibility to provide approved content and imagery for the features or enhancements that we include on each iteration of the company site.
One thing I've noticed in this job and several previous ones is that the Marketing department is extremely particular about wording and presentation, but has little to no understanding of the actual medium with which they're working - the web.
I find that my team is constantly making best guesses for various HTML attributes like image alt text, titles, rel tags, blockquote cite attributes and the like. How reasonable is it to expect that marketing departments have a strong understanding of the purpose of HTML metadata? Should it be the developer's job to remind and inform each time or are marketing departments falling behind the technology they're working with?
What could I reasonably expect our marketing department to understand and provide every time with each new work request?
More posts by @Si4351233
2 Comments
Sorted by latest first Latest Oldest Best
It would be nice if they have HTML experience, but more often than not, they don't seem to. Is there anyone at the company that could be officialy designated as a part-time HTML assistant for marketing, so it's an allocated part of their time on their timesheets?
Another option would be to give them access to the content directly (but not in production, only in a test environment) through some kind of managed CMS. Many CMSs have HTML editors that don't require the user to actually know HTML, only click on buttons for bold, italic, etc., just like in Word. Problem is that the CMS may be too restrictive for the Marketing types, who have a very specific vision of what they want. I've seen the CMS route work in some very corporate environments, where they wanted all the content to be similar and conform closely to their standards.
EDIT: If the term is new to you, CMS == Content Management System.
They need to provide everything you need, but you need to ask for it in their language, like you would with any other customer.
As a web designer for a client, you wouldn't ask the client to take an HTML class first, would you?
Terms of Use Create Support ticket Your support tickets Stock Market News! © vmapp.org2024 All Rights reserved.