There is more than meets the eye with building and maintaining a website.

Dear ALice Toh Wan Yi,

It was heartening to read your post dated December 20, 2011.

Initially I thought exactly the same way as you did when I first started out in marketing and pr. I thought how hard can a website be? I soon learnt that there is so much that goes on behind the scene for a website in order for it to function properly and become a valuable resource to a business.

Unfortunately for me, when I moved from sales to marketing and pr (my current position), I did not have anyone else in my department who could help. It was just me. So I set out to find the answers to my questions online.

I was pleased to find many websites out there to assist PR and marketing professionals.
One in particular that I found useful is Hub Spot. Follow the following link and see for yourself -
http://www.hubspot.com/marketing-resources/

There are many PR and Marketing websites out there that you can subscribe to which will send you daily updates with useful information. For social media, I believe it is a must to subscribe to online support sites; with continual changes to social media, it is challenging and time consuming keeping abreast of these changes.

I have also learnt a lot by networking with people, both within and outside of my industry. In the past I had undervalued networking but I was surprised to learn how much you can learn from other professionals and business owners. Individuals that own their own businesses seem to know a fair amount about how to best market their services.

As an employee of a large company, one of my challenges is that the time spent managing a website and social media is grossly underestimated by upper management. Particularly for the behind the scenes work such as; updating meta-tags, labelling all pictures, monitoring search engine optimisation and making other adjustments when needed.

Though I have found that my skills obtained working as a sales consultant have aided me in presenting a sound argument as to why my time should be invested in certain tasks and why tasks can take as long as they do. The time to do this (communicate) then needs to be factored into the overall project also.

So it seems there is really a whole lot more to a website than meets the eye!
Best of luck with your prac,
D. Cornish

Curtin University
Bentley Campus, Western Australia.