"The Most Powerful Skills You Could Have as a Webmaster"Written by Raynay Valles
What are most powerful skills you could have as a webmaster? HTML and website creation programs Graphics programs Perl CGI ASP Javascript Coldfusion Those skills are great, but what many employers and clients REALLY WANT goes unsaid. What they do not tell you is this: They really want high-impact results. And you can get high-impact results by honing high-impact skills. High-impact skills are: +designing to facilitate sales +search engine optimization, submittal and tracking +writing to sell +knowing how to increase traffic that results in sales +tracking success of ad campaigns Imagine taking a website from 0 to 100,000 people a month through your search engine efforts. Or placing ads in publications you recommended that resulted in thousands in sales. Or revamping an old site in a way that causes twice as many people to buy from your site.
| | Search UtilitiesWritten by Richard Lowe
Supporting a web site is hard work. I should know, I support sixteen of them, plus two intranets at my day job. If you do everything properly, you (or your staff) have to design site, prototype it, code it, maintain it, promote it and do any of a hundred other things. There are a bazillion details to take care of, from color of text, size of characters and, of course, site navigation.Coming up with a good navigation scheme can be very hard. The larger site, more difficult task. Having a site with lots of pages and a good mixture of material makes it even more difficult. How do you get your visitors to information they want without lots of confusing labels, pictures and links? Virtually every site will have some top-level links on their primary entry page. Most webmasters have learned to duplicate those links on most or all other pages on their sites so people can get from anywhere on site to anywhere else. The problem is that this only gives your visitors a few options. If they don't see what they like, they may look at a page or two, become frustrated and leave. This has happened to me many, many times. I'll visit a site and if I don't see what I want I'll go somewhere else fast. Unless, of course, I find some way to search for what I need. You see, adding search capabilities to your site suddenly gives you an incredibly flexibly, user-definable navigation scheme. Unless your site is very small, it would be extremely difficult for you to provide a navigation scheme which gets your visitors to anything they might need. Site specific search engines provide this capability.
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