It’s Labor Day Weekend, and I couldn’t be more excited. It’s been an intense week at work. Hurricane Katrina hit, and I’ve tried to keep lifeteen.com updated with relevant content. Our friend Paul George has been a key figure in a refuge effort an hour outside of New Orleans. He sent me email updates and photos that I in turn posted to the site.

Any week on lifeteen.com is insanely busy. We update the site at least 30 times each day. Adam Robo and I work like madmen to keep it all together. So keeping the Katrina feature updated adds to the insanity. On top of that, I’ve spent most of the week loading the online store. This includes sorting through thousands of Carlos’s photos, formatting graphics, reviewing inventory, writing product descriptions, and entering it all into the backend. Each product requires over 250 mouse-click decisions just to enter it into the store. When you consider we have 150+ products to enter-in the store, you can see it’s a big project.

I’m beginning to realize that many people within Life Teen do not understand how hard Adam and I work each day to make the website come to life. It’s not that they don’t care–they just don’t know. I’m not looking down on them, but they are too busy with their own responsibilities to spend time trying to grasp my own responsibilities. This becomes a big issue when people expect more of us and we’re already giving all we have.

The website has become a cornerstone of our ministry, and everyone wants to be represented on the site. But nobody knows how much work we come into everyday; there is literally not enough time to do anything more. There’s no time to clear up misunderstandings through meetings or conference calls. We need two more people on staff before we can even answer the phone or reply to someone’s email.

So I took three hours this morning—my Saturday morning–to calculate how much BIGGER the new site is than the old one. Maybe hard numbers will help people understand me and Adam’s situation. I hate to use my Saturday morning like that, but something had to be done. I have three pages of stats, but here’s what stands out the most:

Number of Pages of Content:
V1: 562
V2: 3,868
=688% larger

Page Views / Month
V1: 610,000
V2: 3,000,030
=491% larger

So when we go back to the studio after Labor day, I’ll give these numbers to Mark and see what it means in the bigger picture. I’m hoping that these statistics will open people’s eyes to the impact of the website, and what we need to do to make the most of it. That’s when I can explain that the solution isn’t expecting us to do more, it’s about getting us help so we CAN do more.