Things I've learned that make life easier #3: Work with people, not computers

It's very tempting as a web-person to get caught up in the minutiae of coding. Even if you are, like me, a web content manager, whose job only tangentially has anything at all to do with code, you're still likely to spend a lot of your day working on behind-the-scenes aspects of the site such as navigation tweaks and new features.

This is possibly the comfort zone for you, and it's definitely the comfort zone for your managers. They hired you because they didn't feel up to taking on the web and, more often than should happen, this is because they equate "web" with "computer code stuff" and "computer code" with "scary". So they want to see you at your computer screen, solving all the computer-based "stuff" they hired you to deal with.

If you let the computer be the main place you are, you lose three things:

1. You lose control of strategy
   If you sit at a computer doing techie things, everyone assumes you're a techie. And while there's absolutely no shame in being a techie, the sad fact is that they're the kind of people that people only consult when they run into problems. In other words, if you want to take part in the talks that go on *before* problems arise - i.e. the more strategy-related discussions - you need to get away from the computer.
   
   
2. You lose sight of your site's users
   Everyone knows that the only way to get your site right is to involve users. Whether you do this by proper full-on usability testing, focus groups to gather requirements, informal chats, or all of the above, you're going to need to leave the computer to do it. And since user testing is best done often, you're going to spend significant time away from the screen to do it effectively.
   
   
3. You lose the chance to advocate
   Almost without a doubt you know more about proper web content management than your managers - that's why they hired you after all. If nothing else, you're going to have a pretty clear set of ideas about how you want to see the site developing. What better way to make sure your message spreads than to tell people face-to-face? Time away from the computer works doubly well in this case: it gives you time to be with people, and also means you're not irrevocably associated in their minds with scary computer stuff.