Even small shops can make their mark.

I am an accidental Webmaster.

I certainly didn't set out to become the person in charge of designing and maintaining the Charleston Gazette's Web site when I attended the first meeting of the Charleston Newspapers' Internet committee. I already had a full plate as the newspaper's editorial page editor.

Plus, although I was very familiar with the Internet and wrote a twice-monthly column on computer issues, I knew nothing about authoring pages for the World Wide Web. But I was excited after the meeting and went home to play with the new version of a word processor, which included a Hyper Text Markup Language converter that made coding by hand mostly unnecessary. (Later we would move to Adobe Page-Mill, a more stable program.) I designed a simple mockup of the newspaper's home page to show at the next meeting.

What followed should have been predictable. I ended up with near-sole responsibility for the site, which was publicly launched about three months later. I took a crash self-taught course in Web design and, with excellent support from the computer room and the copy desk, came up with a system for transferring a good portion of the paper's daily content onto what I hoped was an attractive, easily navigable site.

Still, it was an overwhelming task that consumed a good three to four hours a day. And it didn't take long after the page was established for readers to start complaining when updates weren't done over the weekend, or when the new edition wasn't posted until late in the afternoon.

Given the pressure I was under, I didn't always respond to these complaints as graciously as I should have. The task became immeasurably easier when my bosses broke down after nearly a year and hired a part-timer to come in and update the pages. He has taken most of the time pressure off, but I still try to find time for special Web projects.

Looking back now, it's hard to imagine how I managed both jobs. I was not performing either as well as I should have. Editorials suffered from lack of research and polishing time, while the Web site was not updated in the timely fashion required of a daily newspaper.

But the end-product has been worth the year of havoc. The Gazette page is popular, pulling in more than 2,500 visits a day and allowing readers all over the state and country immediate access to our content. One board member for the newspaper reads the paper from Australia. Before the Web page debuted, she had to wait up to three months to get an issue.

Ideally, a newspaper making the plunge into a Web edition would hire the personnel and buy all the necessary equipment. But not all small papers can afford that. We managed to go for a year on the Web with no more expense than a Macintosh. Expenses since then have included some software upgrades and miscellaneous equipment. The part-timer works approximately 28 hours a week at a little more than minimum wage. (The actual updating, while tedious, takes very little skill.)

While I would not necessarily want to relive that first year, I do miss the excitement of being on the front line of a grand experiment, especially one that has worked out so well.

NCEW member Dan Radmacher is editorial page editor of The Charleston Gazette in West Virginia. His e-mail address is [e-mail].