When selecting a webmaster, there are several key factors to ascertain and consider:
By carefully evaluating these factors, you can select a webmaster who meets your specific requirements, understands your business goals, and can help you create and maintain a successful website.
- Assess your organization’s needs and resources. Webmasters come with varied levels of expertise and costs. Inexpensive webmasters use very basic templates. They create inflexible products. At the other extreme, expensive webmasters design a site from scratch and can modify it to meet your changing needs.
- Begin your search by seeking a webmaster with experience in building and maintaining websites similar to the one you desire in terms of industry, size, and complexity.
- Carefully examine their portfolio to evaluate the quality of their work, their design style, and their technical capabilities. Review their portfolio for visually appealing and user-friendly websites.
- Ask them if they are skilled and experienced with email technologies, domain registration and management, Domain Name Service configuration and troubleshooting, web servers and databases.
- Ask which technologies and hosting platforms the candidate has actually used and listen to their reasons for any preferences.
- Request an estimate of ongoing operating costs for the site. Discuss their website maintenance and support services, including updates, security patches, and troubleshooting.
- Determine their expertise in search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to ensure your website ranks well in search results. Ask and hope that the candidate gives examples of what they have done in the past. This may not be a critical skill, but rather a “nice to have”.
- Confirm their knowledge of website security best practices to protect your website from vulnerabilities and cyber-attacks. Depending upon the sensitivity of information included on your site, you might seek a person (or consultant to the webmaster) who has professional security experience and is like-minded.
- The webmaster should communicate clearly, using terms that a lay person understands. State directly your expectations regarding response times to your inquiries and frequency of reporting.
- Request references from previous clients to gauge their satisfaction with the webmaster’s services.
- Consider your long-term needs for website maintenance, updates, and technical support. This is perhaps the most important consideration of all: “Are they likely to stick around?” Finding someone who meets all your other criteria, but who will lose interest or be pulled away by other personal priorities after a few weeks or months… should be a giant red flag!