Hi Doug,

I read Danciti's response today and wanted to just get this out in the open - setting up and maintaining a blog is possible, and not entirely too difficult.

However, setting up a professional website, and actually managing your web presence is no small task. It is a full time job and requires a team with resources.

Just ask Marlon at Dance-Tech.net, who works at DNA, or Kristin Sloan who works at NYCBT, or Caleb Custer who works at Cedar Lake.

Choreographers and dancers should not be tasked with yet another full time job. The arts, dance, and non-profit community needs to respond to this. The real question here is: How will non-profits be managing their online presence going forward?

We're doing pretty damn fantastic so far, but it's not sustainable, and it's not cheap.

I've setup multiple sites (and blogs) for companies (many of them are your readers), all with varying skill levels. Some companies manage their sites, others have interns, and others keep me on retainer to do it for them.

Running a blog, a site, and online communities are not all the same things, and require different approaches, and different skills.

I've actually been responsible for misleading companies into thinking they could do it all themselves. I've tried to correct this. Now, I always make an effort to tell everyone I work with up front that they will manage their site, but should not be expected to set it up + design it themselves.

If companies do manage to do it themselves, then they are simply more tech savvy than others.

However, this advice is simply not responsible.

It takes companies weeks, if not months, to do the same thing it will take me minutes if not a few hours to do.

Social media, blogs, and content management systems are not magic bullets. They take a great deal of effort and will eventually require companies to restructure how they work.

Let's be responsible and do our best to manage expectations.

Let the debates begin.

Thanks,
Jaki

Thanks, Jaki!

I have many thoughts and I'll follow-up soon.

Jaki,

I believe that you and Danciti are viewing one of my suggested topics for upcoming Meetups in a much different context than I had in mind.

As I wrote above, one of the ideas for a presentation would be:

How dancers can create professional websites without any technical training or background, and do this very inexpensively.

What I specifically had in mind was to have a dancer or a person who works with a dance company give us a demonstration of how they used one of the many easy-to-use content management applications to build a website from scratch.

I think that such a demonstration would be very helpful and worthwhile for dancers to see and then to follow-up on with their own questions. And one of the issues that might come-up is what are the pros and cons of pursuing a do-it-yourself approach to web development.

We've seen a proliferation of software programs and technologies that bring design, web development, video production and the creation of other types of online content to a much larger audience than ever before. And I think that one of the opportunities for face-to-face gatherings within the dance community is to showcase the different tools and approaches that people are using.

There are clearly many challenges and issues that should be addressed in the process of creating and managing one's on-going Internet presence. Jaki, you raise a number of important ones. But I wasn't directly addressing these issues in my proposed topic and I think that such a hands-on demonstration would be very enlightening.