Forum Moderators: phranque
The learning curve for me in the last few months has been immense to put it mildly.
I have decided to restrict myself to open source and, for the moment anyway, non-flash (equal considerations for this: being my own investment and page load speeds on modems). Also, I’m steering clear of frames.
I thought it would be fun to write a “job description” for an open source, one man band, webmaster (me). Of course, the number of staff doesn’t really matter – a job role is a job role regardless of who fills it – but of course there are considerations of management of people in whom you having varying degrees of trust.
Anyway, how many hats does a one-person-webmaster need to wear and what skills does she/he require to competently wear those hats?
By the way – I’m talking about a webmaster who designs pages for humans – small businesses or hobbyists who simply want to sell their wares, promote themselves, or get a point across – not one who specialises in cloaking and a million cross promotions and sales – this does not interest me in the slightest (I get dizzy looking at “Piccadilly Circus” sites).
I am going to miss out a fair bit here I suspect but I thought – what the heck – this is a forum (definition 2. from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000.) “A public meeting or presentation involving a discussion usually among experts and often including audience participation.” (Even though I’m in the latter category at the moment (audience), I’ll give it a go.)
So, technical skills, analysis skills (and BS-detectors), management / negotiating skills, sales, marketing, search engine technician (ie. understanding this generally and a few specifically), what else?
So far, I have really only looked at some of the technical skills - I offer this for criticism (to be shot down in flames if it be so) as well as attempting to get an idea as to where I should look next (links?). I also hope some of these links prove useful to others :).
Technical skills.
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Some of these roles we obviously hive off to others.
For starters, I use a virtual hosting company so Unix (Redhat [redhat.com] in my case) is not something I need to know a lot about and I trust the hosting company knows what they are doing (my negotiating and BS-detection skills are needed here though).
To varying degrees the same applies to admin for apache [apache.org], database (for the sake of argument PostgreSQL [postgresql.org]), compiler / interpreter etc set-up (PHPn [php.net]). If there’s other admin stuff I have not mentioned it’s because I have not heard about it yet :) – do tell please.
I like to keep some bots away so I needed to find out about robots.txt [robotstxt.org].
I also found out that I could do all sorts of other things using an .htacess file [apache-server.com], like redirecting people from old URLs to new ones etc.
Once I got a bit more into this I found that, to do it properly, I was better off using mod_rewrite [httpd.apache.org]. To do mod_rewrite properly I had to find out about Regular Expressions [etext.lib.virginia.edu] (which I’ve since found out is really useful in PHP code etc). I also found this RegEx tutorial [gnosis.cx] useful.
By this stage I’d already written some pretty fundamental html using any number of online tutorials. I actually found that an idiot’s guide book (you remember, those things you leave open beside your monitor as you beaver away) was the most useful tool for this part of the learning.
I needed online reminders of how to play around with HTML and I found this w3.org HTML reference [w3.org] handy (although I found myself looping around a bit but eventually got the hang of it).
I needed to put my Web pages up there on the server (using FTP) and found this windows client (WSFTP lite edition for free) [ftpplanet.com] which did the job pretty well. [When I moved to a new Unix only hosting company they suggested I use a more secure ftp client (WINSCP) [winscp.sourceforge.net] which I now use.]
I started looking at my Web logs..... (some of which I downloaded in text format for safe keeping) waiting for all these people to come flocking to my site and..... nothing happened..... I kept looking anyway and did not understand the codes I kept seeing there so I found this old w3.org rfc2616 tome [w3.org] that helped.
I submitted my site(s) to the ODP (DMOZ) and to Google [google.com.au] (and I looked at other search engines but was not prepared to pay the price) and..... still nothing happened..... “Wait!” they said..... and they were correct, eventually the robots and the people started to come and then..... more robots! (but not too many people yet).
I found that I really wanted to keep robots away that did not honour my wishes expressed in robots.txt so I needed to find out more about how to use .htacess for this. I didn’t know which robots were good and which were simply stealing email addresses so I searched WebmasterWorld and found this list of bad robots [webmasterworld.com] (which I subsequently modified – I quickly learnt to not trust everything I read in WebmasterWorld and also – we all have different preferences – “If you want what we have, do what we do.”).
By this stage I had a few pages up (developed using Mozilla [mozilla.org] as my default browser – because I hate pop-ups – but testing with Internet Explorer [no url supplied – they have enough already :(] I already had IE installed primarily to find my PR in Google using the Google toolbar [toolbar.google.com]).
So, I read something about having Validated HTML [validator.w3.org] and found that I was pretty invalid but it still worked on Netscape (Mozilla) and IE (and mostly on Opera too) so I decided that I’d have to put that on the back burner for a while.
Meanwhile, Cascading Style Sheets looked like a really neat way to do things like menus on the side (seeing as how I didn’t want to use frames) and I went to the W3C website and got lost and, as a consequence, stumbled on this w3.org CSS gem [w3.org] as a good starting point (it also has some excellent stuff on ‘Web safe colours’).
So, what else did I need to find out about?
Javascript to create a pop-up window with no nav buttons that I would reuse with each new click (and I’d make sure it got the focus each time).
I couldn’t find a one-stop URL for finding this technique – or the tricks I’ve used to (a) close that window and return focus where I want it and (b) take the user to my home page if they happen to enter the site through that non-menued window.
There are many JS sites with lots of scripts.
The most important things I found out about JS were:
1) Not all JS is created equal;
2) Not all browsers support JS (but I have learnt to live with this);
3) Google and other search engines do not follow Javascript pop-up window links.
You probably all know the last of these but this fundamental point somehow slipped through my learning net and I found out the hard way: The pages that had been picked up before I changed my entire site to this technique where not picked up again when I changed my country specific TLD to an unqualified TLD - D’oh! – easily fixed by (a) removing much of my laboriously entered href’s and (b) putting in a decent site map.
I have not yet had the joy of using PostgreSQL but I did throw out the incredibly verbose Perl Form Mail I borrowed (which is where I’d first seen and not understood RegEx) and wrote a PHP form for doing much the same thing – my major concern (apart from getting some clean error trapping and having the data remain on the form when the form is redisplayed after the error) was spam-proofing it (which I seem to have done).
Wow – so much to learn! In writing that last paragraph I got a wave of “I’ve only scratched the surface” emotion...........
Other technical skills?
I guess the ones that have proved most useful where the ones I used to choose a new hosting company. This task also involved my “analysis and BS-detector” hat to start with and then eventually my “negotiating” hat as well.
I knew from experience in the dotcom in which I worked, that Unix was only as good as its admins. I got a little scared when I found out that I knew more about mod_rewrite than the admins where I was hosting so, I looked for local (Australian) hosting companies that used 100% or at least lots of Unix. I started this simply by doing a search.
I focused on companies who seemed to have been around a little while, who had customer testimonials (with links to real sites that were running), and who had decent rates. I got down to about 6 companies this way.
I then found out (here in WebmasterWorld) that I could find out what a site is running [uptime.netcraft.com] and also who the “Netblock Owner” was. I checked to make sure they were in fact running Unix (and Redhat in particular) and also how reliable they and (more importantly) there clients’ websites currently were.
I also did selected reverse-IP lookups on some of the clients to get a general idea of the neighbourhood.
I then contacted each hosting company with my detailed requirements – politely requesting an equally detailed response and then we spoke on the phone and I haggled for a “reseller” price with lines such as “as I grow so do you”.
The most amenable (and as it turned out the one with the best price and best uptime and the best included options such as PostgreSQL etc) is now my hosting company. Time will tell if this was a good approach.
Is my Web site a raging success yet? No, but I think I am starting out on the right footing. (Also, I have only spent a minimal amount on Adwords and no other promotion yet.)
As far as the other hats are concerned: analysis skills (and BS-detectors), management / negotiating skills, sales, marketing, SEO skills, link arranging (or is that just negotiating - no I guess I have to know where to look) (and anything else?)?
I remain here to learn more.
Did you spend all day typing that? :)
You've covered a lot of ground. I'd also suggest learning the basics about e-commerce, shopping cart systems, SSL, merchant's accounts and such - nearly every inquiry we get these days is asking for the ability to sell online... And that's platform specific, so a multiple cans of worms.
Also, good basic business skills - it's not good for cash flow if you forget to bill someone - put systems in place to manage that stuff and use them.
LisaB
...and no, I regret to say that I did not know that Redhat was not Unix - well, I mean, err yes I did know that it was Linux but I sort of thought that it was cool to still call in Unix.
[I know the name of the penguin too which is more than some :)]
[BTW I'm building a site based on this stuff ("Wow what a novel idea!" I here the old hands groan ;)) so if you are after the links stickymail me and I'll send the URI - it's pretty rough at the moment.]
BTW call it 'nix and you'll be all set ;)
Is my Web site a raging success yet? No, but I think I am starting out on the right footing.
I think you're going to have many 'RAGING' successes!
Thanks for all the links too!
Right now I'm reading an interesting book that might do you some good:
Webmaster In a Nutshell [amazon.com]
LOL! A friend gave me a copy of that, that's so old it talks about HTML 3.0 or whatever as the current standard.
I hope they've updated it. It's a fabulous book, it's just that parts of it became outdated so quickly...
The problem with books like that. I'm sure the one you're looking at is a more recent version.
Thanks for laying that out. It is always very interesting to see the approaches and effort that are put into the job by other webmasters.
I have flagged this post, as the resources are are very relevant to me at the mo.
Ta
Limbo
Webmaster In A Nutshell
Thanks for the link to this and for the comments - I've not seen the book but the two main user reviews on the Amazon page seem to sum it up (and also kind of reflect what's here so far in this post):
1) It's great to have a technical reference on hand, and a good one is best (and it seems that it has been updated DragonLady);
2) There is a lot more to webmstering than the technical nuts and bolts!
LOL! A friend gave me a copy of that, that's so old it talks about HTML 3.0
Well slap my knee thank goodness for editions.
most important be diplomatic in seeding in client's brain that the site is not an ode to its glory :)
but is an image of what his users would like finding
cheers
Anyhow, you don't want history lessons, you want practical techniques. I'm finding a lot, and I mean A Lot, of people are interested in discovering what they need to know to start a business. So I've been collating the advice given me, and hope I can present it in article format like you have, bpresent. We should cooperate. :D
