Forum Moderators: phranque
also, how can we tell a good webmaster from one that's less qualified? what type of exercise would be useful to differentiate good candidates and bad candidates?
Thanks,
Simon
I would always try and get recommendations from other professionals, people that you trust.
Works for me.
Thanks.
Make them work to get the position. For 1 job I had to go through 3 days of interviews and face a panel interview with 2 others going for the same position.
how can we tell a good webmaster from one that's less qualified?
There was a great post here a few weeks ago from one of the real gurus (I think it was tedster?) that posed a couple critical questions. I remember at least one and I'll throw in a couple of my own. Most of these are opinions, take them or leave them:
Ask them what a document type declaration is and why you need it.
Ask how they manage fonts and other visual markup. The correct answer here is style sheets, not font tags. Many people can't even answer this question either way - "I click on it in Dreamweaver and select the font."
On that topic, what is a depricated tag?
What do you do to your sites to optimize them for search engines?
What do you know about SEO?
Ask to see several of their sites. Then go to w3c.org, select the validator link, and punch in the URL. Now, understand, most pages out there won't validate immediately. But what you're looking for here is the "webmaster's" reaction to that page, and how many errors it returns. Gauge it closely. This is a good indicator of what your new web person will do when cornered.
Do you have existing pages,scripts, and systems in place? Set them in front of a perl or php script and ask them to find and fix a typo.
Ask them what they do to insure cross-browser and cross platform compatibility, and how they cope with monitor resolutions. In my OPINION, when someone starts spouting the low percentages of users from this or that browser, or that no one uses this or that browser anymore, what you have is someone who will justify their errant ways, or worse yet, designs/develops for a single target market - their boss. To heck with the rest of the world, they're not paying my check. You want someone who will at least TRY to make sure every user can access your content.
Ask them if they know what 508 guidelines are, and what a text reader is for.
When posed with something they don't understand - for example, someone who doesn't know Javascript at all - ask what they would do if a task requires it. If the answer is "download one free off the web" as opposed to "learn it so I can apply that knowledge to future projects" IMO this would make me back off. The reason being many people get this stuff free and have no understanding of how it works. Then when it breaks, the shrugs are . . . priceless . . .
Just some ideas.
So on that note I would like to add that while asking the questions allow the prospective web builder to ask questions, a lot of information can be gained by the questions asked .
Thanks again.
