⚏Working together in a team

The roles are tiered — anyone who may do more may do everything the tier below may do:

• Read. View, change nothing. For people who only need to keep up with what is happening.
• Edit. Change and save content, but not publish. The right role for everyone who contributes texts.
• Publish. Put changes live.
• Manage. In addition, settings, user accounts, domain, legal texts.

The most important dividing line is between Edit and Publish. Someone who writes texts does not need to be allowed to decide when they become public — and most people do not want to.

Assign the role according to what someone is meant to do, not according to their position in the business.

Via the account management: enter the address, choose a role, invite. The person sets a password themselves.

Three rules that have proved their worth:

• One account per person. A shared password makes every later question of “who did that?” impossible to answer.
• The smallest role that will do. You can always extend it.
• Switch it off immediately when someone leaves. Not at the end of the month, but on the last day.

Someone who only needs to correct a text occasionally often needs no access to the administration at all — that is what the editor directly on the website is for.

The procedure that works without additional tools:

1. Whoever writes, saves — the change is held as a draft.
2. Whoever approves looks at it in the preview. The preview address can be passed on.
3. Feedback, if something is missing — ideally on the text itself, using the comment function.
4. Publishing by someone with the appropriate role.

For larger rebuilds, group the changes in a release: then there is a clear point at which things are checked, and everything goes live together.

What you should clarify beforehand: who approves, and what happens if that person is on holiday for two weeks? An approval with exactly one person responsible is not an approval but a bottleneck.

There is a lock: whoever is editing a page holds it until they have finished. The second person sees this and can wait, or take over the lock if the first person has forgotten it.

What you should still bear in mind:

• Let people know when you are working on a larger rebuild. A lock does not explain what you are planning.
• Do not leave pages open. A window left open overnight blocks someone else the next morning.
• Take care with symbols. A symbol appears on several pages; whoever changes it changes pages someone else may be working on at that moment.

With two or three people, agreement is enough. From five upwards, a fixed rhythm is worthwhile: who works on what, and when.

Ideally where it belongs: as a comment on the section, not as an email saying “on the second page, third paragraph”.

What makes feedback useful:

• Specific. “Phone number missing” rather than “looks unfinished”.
• Decidable. “Should the old or the new price be here?” can be answered; “I don’t like it” cannot.
• About the text, not the person.

Finally, a rule that saves the most: read first, then give everything at once. Five comments one after another over two days cost the writer more time than five at once.

In the website’s change history. It records who changed something when, and who published.

What you need this for:

• “Since when has it said that?” — the most common question of all.
• After a mistake: who changed it, and did they know what they were doing?
• At a handover: what has happened in recent months?

What the history does not replace: an agreement. If you have to reconstruct after the event who changed a price, you have a process problem, not a tool problem.

On the last day, not later:

1. Switch off the account. Do not delete it — switched-off accounts keep their assignment in the history.
2. Check where the person is named. Team page, contact person for services, contact details, legal notice (Impressum) for board members.
3. Remove photos if there is no continuing consent.
4. Change email addresses in forms and newsletters.
5. Check third-party login details — domain management, email provider. This is the point most often forgotten, and the most expensive.

With a change of board, the legal notice is added to the list: the authorised representative is a required detail.

With a handover that consists of more than a password:

• Access to the website with the appropriate role.
• Login details for the domain management — or at least the information on where they are and who has them.
• Where the images come from and under which licences.
• What needs doing regularly — opening hours, events, the annual legal review.
• What has been discussed and decided — why the site is structured the way it is.

Write this on one page. For clubs with a changing board, this one sheet is the difference between a maintained website and a frozen one.

And: hand over in conversation, not by email. Half an hour together in front of the screen saves months.

The division that has proved its worth:

• The agency builds, designs, sets up and takes care of everything technical — domain, legal texts, structure.
• You maintain the content that changes: opening hours, events, prices, news.

The reason for this boundary is not responsibility but speed: an opening time for which you have to write an email and wait for a reply does not get changed.

If you do not want to do anything yourself, that is a decision too — but then you should know what a change costs and how long it takes. Clarify that beforehand.

For small text changes there is the editor directly on the page. With it, your customers can correct texts without being able to change anything else.

Five sentences, written down once:

1. Who decides when two opinions clash.
2. Who publishes — and who stands in for that person.
3. What may be changed without asking (typos, opening hours) and what may not (prices, legal texts, structure).
4. How you confirm that something has been checked.
5. When things are reviewed — a fixed date, even if only once a quarter.

That sounds like bureaucracy for a website with seven pages. But it is exactly the agreement whose absence leads to nobody changing anything in the end, because nobody feels responsible.