I don’t care how small your company is, somebody needs to have the website as part of their job. And in a lot of the small businesses I work with, that person ends up being the founder (or sometimes both co-founders….), neck-deep in working on the site themselves.
I get it. I’m a founder too, and founders, if they’re anything like me, get a random idea, want to run with it, and forget about it five seconds later. The website is a very logical place to scratch that itch. So the question of who gets to edit it matters more than it sounds.
Whatever the size of the company, your website needs one gatekeeper: one person whose job includes the site, who keeps the brand, messaging structure and design principles intact, and who knows when it’s intentionally a good time to break the rules.
Who should own the company website day to day?
The perfect case scenario is that ONE person owns the website. That’s true at a 10-person company and it’s still true even when you have a marketing department. The website is the one place where everyone on the team has an opinion (…. whether it’s valid or not is a whole other post lol).
In my experience the job looks like this: the gatekeeper makes sure the brand, the messaging structure and the design principles are followed on every new page, and they’re also the person who knows when it’s intentionally a good time to break those rules. That second half is what separates a gatekeeper from a bottleneck. A gatekeeper who only says no turns into the developer ticket you were trying to get away from (more on that in what to do when every website change needs a developer ticket).
What the gatekeeper should NOT need is web experience. It should be something a person with a good understanding of both content and layouts, because if you can take the building blocks from a design and put strong, on-message content into them, you don’t need a designer’s eye to do it.
Should the founder be the one editing the company website?
A lot of times, the answer is “right now, yes, because nobody else will.” I’m the same way with my own – but the thing is knowing that is the case. Even in small businesses I tend to find the founder is the one working on the site, and what I typically see is the website being used as a mechanism to cure boredom. It’s one of those areas that can be tweaked endlessly, with zero progress being made (if a page gets stuck at 80% and not published, it still isn’t published).
You can usually tell which kind of site you’re looking at. When a founder is calling the shots, the edits are a lot more scattered, because the site follows whatever idea sprinted through their brain. When there’s a CMO or a marketing director guiding things, the changes tend to cluster around specific campaign landing pages, and the core pages and navigation barely move.
So if you’re the founder and you’re the one in the site every week, good on you for caring about it (most people don’t). You just need to decide whether or not it’s either (a) a good use of your time or (b) is it just a distraction from other areas of the business.
Why do website edits stall at 80% done?
Because “the last 20%” is what kills people (the Pareto principle strikes again). If you have a solid website, I would hope you CAN get a page to 80% relatively quickly. But why the heck does it fizzle out?
The first is matching. You’re trying to get the new page to line up and look as good as all the other pages, and every single spacing and sizing and color and image decision turns into a design exercise.
The second is standing out. Just for this one page (because it’s super-important), you try to do something a little different so it breaks the mold and catches a newcomer’s attention.
Founders are easy prey for both, because it’s really, really hard to be okay with getting a page to 80% and moving on to the next thing. A good gatekeeper is the person who calls it done without second-guessing things.
The system underneath helps too. If your headers, paragraphs, lists and buttons already have locked-in styles, the person building a page doesn’t have to think about any of that, and the matching trap mostly goes away. I get into the specifics in how to let a marketing team edit the site without breaking it.
Is your company website a calling card or a sandbox?
Most people treat it like a coliseum – never to be touched, and if it is touched, it has to be absolutely perfect. And therein lies the root of both traps. When folks think that everything has to be flawless, launches are delayed, everything has to be perfect, everyone’s opinions need to be taken into account, and then things stall. I think we’d be a lot better off if we viewed our websites more as sandboxes.
Things don’t have to be perfect. In the age of AI, where everything feels buttoned up in the exact same way all over the place, being a little bit unbuttoned showcases a little bit of being human, and I think that’s an advantage. Heck, when I launched our video game website, some of the animations didn’t work, some of the graphics didn’t line up perfectly, and some of the functionality had ZERO purpose. I pushed “publish” anyway. And you know who carded? No one. Not a single person asked “why did the corgi animation jitter a little bit?”
In the age of AI, where everything feels buttoned up in the exact same way all over the place, being a little bit unbuttoned showcases a little bit of being human, and I think that’s an advantage
(BTW – I know I have talked a lot about my video game website – I wrote more about the “why” behind it in why I’m breaking my own website.)
What happens when too many people edit the company website?
The site starts to drift. Having multiple people from the same team edit the website over time isn’t technically a problem, but each person has a slightly different perspective on what looks good. Without a shared order of operations (pick blocks from the library, then write content, then adjust imagery and choose colors from the theme palette), every person starts from a blank white screen and you get different output every time. I lay that sequence out in the order of operations that keeps a new page on brand.
And…. it gets more and more obvious as the company expands, because the more folks you have on the team, the more division heads you get, and everybody feels their division is the most important. A lot of them want their section to look unique so they can plant their own flag inside the larger organization. That’s well intended, and long term it doesn’t make sense.
We worked with a university whose site had no less than 3,000+ pages. One of the first things we did was establish a block library so we could get pages consistent slowly-but-surely. But then, department heads asked for their pages to be unique (they wanted their campaign to stand out). The requests weren’t unusual and fit the blocks we already had, and the feedback still came back as “It’s not different enough.” So we’d design one-off pieces that looked vastly different from every other page, for a small group of visitors who didn’t matter much to the goal of getting new students in. I say this because even with the best intentions, you break your own conventions to make people happy, even though it’s not the best use of time, money or brand equity.
Compare that with a client of ours that has about five different product lines, each aimed at a very different customer (one very hardware oriented, one very beachy, one was for folks who lived in the mountains). On their existing site, each product page used a different font, because that’s how each team made its page feel right for its customer. I totally understand the reasoning. For their new site, we wanted their website to feel completely cohesive, but allow each segment to still remain a smidge different. In the design we’re building, each product page can use different imagery, different iconography and the “base color” the page uses will be a different on-brand color. They have a slew of different blue-to-green hues in their brand palette – and now, each product uses one of them as their “base color” throughout the page. Now, the core layouts stay exactly the same and their orange call-to-action color permeates through each page well.
What should you do when eight people want admin access to the website?
Start thin. In a small company the best answer is a single person has access (maybe one other if all they are going to do is upload blog posts). Once your marketing department has two, three or four people, that obviously changes things, but the idea stays the same: start with as few editors as you can, and have somebody be the gatekeeper who makes sure the brand, messaging structure and design principles are followed.
The other seven people still have ideas worth putting on the site. Those ideas just flow through one person who knows the system, so you don’t end up with eight different design opinions building their own version of the brand.
When should the website gatekeeper break the rules?
When there’s an intentional reason to. Healthy evolution and design drift can look identical on the page, and the difference is intention. If there’s an ad campaign or an event where you want people’s first thought to be “that doesn’t look like anything they’ve done before,” I’m a big fan of that, especially if enough of your core brand elements carry through that it still feels like you.
For example, we worked with a client who wanted to host a large event for an adjacent demographic to their target audience. Making it feel like it was disconnected from the larger brand would actually be helpful. No one would automatically associate the event with the brand and there would be a higher interest level in attending.
Before my entire site went “video game,” I started with just a retro hero image. It looked nothing like the rest of my site. You could absolutely call it drift, except that I did it with purpose. I wanted to see if I crafted this unique design, and then post about it, would the interest in seeing something different draw attention. The answer is a resounding “yes.” So, I edited the content on my homepage to call out the “digital glitch” the banner section was. And because that test was successful, I decided to go all-in on the video game style.
What the gatekeeper is guarding against is the other kind of change, the one your non-web person makes to the site over 12 to 24 months until visitors don’t know what page they’re on anymore. I get into that line more in healthy evolution versus design drift.
So, how can you fix this on a random Tuesday?
Write down one name of a person on your team. Whoever it is, put “owns the website” in their job description this week, and tell the rest of the team where their ideas go. Then look at the last page your team started and never finished and ask whether it’s stuck at 80%. If it is, ship it.
If you’re trying to sort out who should hold the keys to your site, or your team has already started to drift, book a call with Classic City and we’ll talk it through.
FAQ
Who should manage a small business website?
One person, and it should be part of their job. In a lot of small businesses that’s the founder by default, which works only if the founder can get pages to 80% and actually move on (and not infinitely tweak it forever). If they can’t, hand it to someone who can.
Should the CEO have admin access to the company website?
They can have it. The question is whether they should be the one editing. Founders tend to use the website to scratch an itch, and the edits end up scattered across the site. If the CEO has ideas, let them go through the gatekeeper like everyone else’s.
How many people should be able to edit the company website?
Start thin. For a small company that means one. Once your marketing team has two, three or four people, more of them can contribute, but limit their roles. One person still keeps the brand, the messaging structure and the design principles in line.
Does the person managing the website need web design experience?
No. Managing a website really only needs a good understanding of content. I’d recommend building out a block library so when you do go to create a new page, you’re working from existing blocks that already work well together.
Is it ever okay to break the brand guidelines on the website?
Yes, on purpose. A campaign, an event or an experiment can earn a new look if there’s an intentional reason for it and enough of your core brand carries through. Just don’t let that new idea permeate accidentally through everything. What causes trouble is the unplanned kind, where the site changes a little at a time for 12 to 24 months without anybody deciding it should.
