As I alluded to here a while back, I am suffering quite a lack of motivation to do website work at the moment. I have all the responsibilities for the Europäische Bewegung Server but seem to have lost track of the reasons why I am actually doing that work any more. I’ve lost the connection to the federalist cause for the moment – not because I don’t believe in it any more, but just because I am not in the everyday rough and tumble of the organisations any more since standing down from JEF-Europe. My role is now like that of the office photocopier – everyone takes it for granted, until it then goes wrong they curse and complain like hell, and in my case expect that I fix the website for free.
So my 1st June resolution is to keep a tally of all the website work I do for JEF, UEF, European Movement etc., and work out roughly how much that work would cost if the organisations were to pay a freelancer to do the work. In short, I am going to try to put things in my mind at least on a more professional footing, and give myself the opportunity to say no when people have suggestions.
Secondly, I really should do more design work and less tedious server admin work. I’ve been inspired by the CSS Zen Garden website, and now also have the excellent book to accompany it – The Zen of CSS Design. Then there’s also the Web Design Index 6, source of the inspiration for Yazdanfar.se – the kind of website I should be making!
My dearest,
I am really happy that the time I spent in the JEF Europe office, was the time when you felt like taking care of the websites 🙂
I had recently as well the feeling that people tend to not appreciate much the work done, and only comment when there is the opportunity to complain about it.
Hope I wasn’t one of them, but if I was, SORRY JON, you were brilliant and saved us from million troubles, you were actually the first one to teach me how to put 2 pictures together and slowly my Photoshop skills are getting quite fair… I am sure that in the deep of all JEF, EM, UEF thank you for your work but they take for granted that you know it… or maybe the problem is that you weren’t tough enough!
Thanks for the comments… 🙂 It’s an organisation’s *duty* to request things of its webmanager and I’ve been more than willing to do the work for a long time. But you do run out of steam at a certain point!
On VXL’s point – there is a CMS, and on a day to day basis it works very well. But there are always new projects, new ideas, new people needing to be trained. Plus I’ve built up so much knowledge of it all over 5 years that it would be hard to transfer this over to someone!
Excellent idea ! Your work is actually worth thousands of euros.
I intend to make it very clear before I leave (old-age…) JEF-F that I will not fix our websites afterward and that we should recruit someone to do so (I will train a web-knowledgeable person do do so if required). It does require actually a lot of motivation (especially if you have no input on the content) so I wish to focus on websites for organisations where I am actually involved (well, EM or UEF I guess).
It is also fun when you use your NGO’s websites to practice new skills and experiment new ideas but after they’re launched they become actually less fun :-). Well they have a CMS that means the organisation sould not need its webmaster anymore for a long while ?