As some of you may have noticed, clemsontigers.com has basically been offline since the first of July. A new version of the site is “coming soon.” That is a relatively important and trafficked website, I would think. It should be down never. So now that it has been down for three and a half weeks, I’m at least interested in knowing who deserves to be unceremoniously sent packing for what I believe has to be a colossal screw-up.

To be honest, I didn’t love the old site, which I reckoned was mostly designed & operated by CSTV. I base that on my observation that aside from the school name and logos, the site was the same as all the other CSTV websites. Thus I’m modestly optimistic that the new website will be an improvement. Although my optimism is tempered by my memories that I have disliked every school’s athletic site that didn’t use CSTV. I’m picky. I know.

Maybe, just maybe, the website isn’t actually used by anyone other than me. In that case, let’s just get rid of it entirely. I could live with that.

But I doubt that’s the case. And I doubt whoever is in charge really knows what’s going. At least that’s my conclusion after failing to find any kind of specifics and being left to interpret the situation based on a couple of tweets.

The Clemson Athletics twitter feed informed us on July 1st:

our site is down because we have changed website providers, not marketing reasons. Be patient for the new & improved website!

Two weeks later, following criticism from Todd Holley that “[t]here is no reason for it to be down this long,” the response was:

Should be next week. There is a reason, because of a complete overhaul and redesign because of switching hosts.

I can’t imagine any reason for this that doesn’t involve a significant level of incompetence. Thus proving the important distinction between “a reason” and “a good reason.”

Update [2012-07-26 18:05]: There have been a couple more tweets, both on Wednesday, the 25th, since the this post was originally published.

@W10T20 the new website should be launched in the next day or two. Where you will be able to print off a schedule. Thanks for your patience.

@WatkinsMatthew5 plan is to unveil the new website tom. or Fri. It is a more tedious process than people realize. Thanks for your patience.

And it is this last tweet (side note: I really hate twitter and all this “tweet” bullcrap) that makes my point. New websites can take a long time to design, build, and debug. It is a tedious process. And that is why you do all that work before you kill the old website. It seems to be the case that among the people who don’t realize how tedious the process is are the people running the show over there.