Website everything people: Surviving and thriving as a team of one

Have you ever felt like you wear too many hats just to keep your university's web presence up to modern standards and practices while also juggling constantly changing needs and demands of an entire university? How can you shoulder an entire website relaunch project largely by yourself? How can you keep yourself personally and professionally moving forward when the mountain of work is stacked against you?

When I stepped into my role as university web developer, I inherited a website redesign project that had already started but had stalled for over two years. The previous developer had left, and their only support role had been reassigned. For 18 months, the project sat, and the website was being maintained minimally by the university's marketing director, who was not previously involved in website management.

What I walked into was an outdated, volatile CMS running on aging, self-hosted infrastructure; a website carrying 20 years of content across three migrations; and a university community with urgent needs, strong opinions and very little patience. Add in internal management challenges, a full university rebrand and rapidly evolving web standards — and you have the full picture.

Within one year, I relaunched the university website on a new CMS and eliminated more than 7,000 outdated pages. Within two, I redesigned the new website completely to address internal feedback and the aforementioned university rebrand. And somehow, I'm still here.

This talk will tackle the challenge of being a web team of one, lessons learned from a “website everything person” who is still living to tell the tale, and how, despite everything, you can climb the mountain, too, and see success from the other side.