Intro:several years ago I had a job at some big local media company (they own radio, TV, newspapers, magazines, print businesses, marketing research, etc.), I did digital work (photo, editing, and some software development). The web was growing exponentially, and the iPhone didn't exist, yet, but cell phones started to become a big part of the market.
The first website: they (the company) had an "expert" developing one key website (traveling), and they invested a lot of money there. I knew the guy, no bashing intended... he wasn't such an expect, but he was considered as such because he was actually very good at selling himself as a product and as a guru. You may not be surprised that the web development got stuck, and the guy put the company on hold because he was receiving business opportunities along this path. It's amazing how people who are so demanding accepted this treatment by him.
I got involved: by that time I already had my own personal website solidly positioned, somehow related to the stuck company website, so, we talked at my department to ask for "that" website to be handed to us. It happened, and I created a whole new website from scratch with the full support of the company. We were given a few months to show results, and we did, we were climbing search engine positions fast and received email comments every week (about 5 human written emails per week), this jumped to 5 daily on average.
Backfiring? it was just one website growing strong, and as a result of our good work, the company gave us eventually 4 other digital realms, being 5 in total. The funny thing is, despite showing more ROI, the budget was cut to the minimum. I didn't mind, I received a promotion, my own office with AC, really cool, and a raise, but we became "the most productive website operators on low budget". At least they paid me to travel for some years.
How big?the websites grew reaching 7K daily visitors (the original one, the largest), and similar numbers for the other websites. Magazine content was being published, I took care of the SEO, and personally crafted the articles myself for the travel website (I was also the one traveling). This website then was translated to english, german and italian, even wrote the code for a forum.
↑ This is no ego trip, it's context, and I'm not worried that people here at WebmasterWorld may see this as an ego trip, why? because I'm ABSOLUTEY SURE others around here have developed LARGER websites with eve more daily traffic. And probably, they won't be surprised by what happens next.
The problems: after some years going up in numbers, suddenly everyone wanted a piece of the cake to manage the traffic, the design or the direct advertising. Suddenly we didn't speak about writing content... no, everything became about power struggles between different departments, and yes, some were proposing to replace me with some fancy "gurus" who had absolutely no experience with anything alike.
I wrote the CMS, and later when I began planning my exit from the company, we had a bitter conversation about how things could be managed without me, and I got lucky that we all agreed that MY CODE was MINE, not theirs. So, I migrated every single page of every single website to Drupal, so others could take my place in the future. The company had other digital properties with lower traffic operating on WordPress <--- and it was a total nightmare of hacking and internal server error constantly despite searching for better servers.
Now, get ready for what happened next.
