Why do so many schools have terrible websites? Talk to the people in charge, and you rarely find incompetence. On the contrary, the web team is often the first to express dissatisfaction, but their hands are tied by some combination of these problems:

• The webmaster bottleneck. Everyone is busy. If editing web content is any harder than clicking and typing, faculty and staff get discouraged, and the web team (or, heaven forbid, the solitary webmaster) ends up doing everything.

• Web team overcommitment. The people who handle the web are stretched too thin, also handling desktop support, server maintenance, or application development. This leaves little time for web work. Without sophisticated tools for site maintenance, any remaining time goes to drudge work on basic navigation and formatting.

• Outgrown infrastructure. A site of a dozen pages can comfortably be maintained with a copy of Dreamweaver and Apache. But sticking with the same tools as the site grows leads to a constant struggle to maintain consistent navigation, style, and structure.

These problems weigh on the web team, leading to overwork, poor or out-of-date content, and disorganized, inconsistent sites. But it doesn't have to be that way. Though no software can magically transform bad sites into good, a good content management system such as Plone provides out-of-the-box navigation and formatting consistency. It gives your faculty and staff a simple visual editor so they can contribute just by clicking and typing. It even lets you enforce review procedures to make sure that content quality is up to snuff. In short, Plone lets the computers handle the repetitious work they are good at, freeing humans to make your site's content, structure, and visual design worthy of the organization it represents.