I started working in University Marketing and Communications (UMC) as a student web content specialist in 2003. At that time, every department, college, group, etc across campus managed their own website. Server space was provided by Central IT. If you knew how to code, you could have a website and you could make it look however you wanted.
It didn’t take long for UMC to realize that this would cause problems. How can you have any semblance of brand standards, a cohesive user experience, search engine optimization, or web accessibility under such a wild and unwieldy setup? A history of failed attempts to centralize web maintenance followed and left us with a realization that “influence without authority” was our best path forward to make Michigan Tech’s websites the best they can be.