Being a webmaster requires knowing what a webmaster is and what responsibilities are required. If you cannot maintain your own site, why bother having one. You might as either pay someone to help maintain your site or as I already said… don’t even bother having a website.
A webmaster is someone who does not necessarily have to own a website. They are people who have knowledge in areas of content creation and copy writing, design, and development. Social media marketing is an optional skill, but definitely a part of running an up-to-date and successful site.
In fact, a webmaster, according to Wikipedia is:
A webmaster (from web and master),[1] also called a web architect, web developer, site author, or website administrator, is a person responsible for maintaining one or many websites.
The reason why you should either become a better webmaster for your website or at least hire someone to maintain it for you is that you need to stay on top of any changing information in your niche. If you have a business and your store moves, obviously, you don’t want to leave the old address up for months or even years. You also will want to update products that you offer or remove ones that are no longer in stock as soon as possible in order to not create confusion with customers.
In the case of bloggers, you want to blog just enough so that your visitors don’t get fed up waiting for more content.
How to Be a Better Webmaster
- When you have a change of address, phone, or means of contact, make sure to change it immediately.
- Update products or services if they are no longer available, are needed to be added to the site, or if the information needs to be made up-to-date
- Experiment with ways like A/B testing or moving content around your pages to convert more of your visitors to readers, subscribers, and even customers.
- While you do not want to alienate your visitors by constantly changing your brand, look to find more effective ways to make your brand more memorable.
- If you have a blog, post articles often. Once or twice a week at a minimum is great, but three to five times is excellent.
- Make sure to look through your entire site and proof it for grammatical errors, script errors, design flaws, and even code flaws.
- Encourage your visitors to volunteer feedback so you can make improvements to your website.
- Provide easy ways for your visitors to share your content or products with others on social networks, by email, or by other means.
- Always remember to stay well informed of any new information in your niche so you can stay on top of it.
These are merely a few suggestions that you can use as a guideline to be a better webmaster.
Do you do any of these with your website? What other suggestions do you have?
This is well known information re-summarized as a reminder for what you webmaster’s should be doing. As a SEO, it’s vital that webmasters keep up with their responsibilities as usability is now a stronger part in SEO. Keep on rockin the content, great post!
As long as it is for webmastering their own sites its okay. But when you consider providing a webmastering service then the person should be familiar with different server environments, development is must and along with debugging, security etc.
Because when you are providing this as a service in most of the cases the website/business is quite successful one and has its own set of problems which you have to rectify.
It is definitely important to be familiar in all areas of managing a website. However, a lot of people use web hosts, so managing a web host is more a 3rd party thing, especially if the client you are managing is on a shared, reseller, or VPS…they don’t have total root access. So, that area is many times out of the webmaster’s hands.
Most of web-mastering is on the usage side and yes… security is VERY important.
As for the individual maintaining their own website, they should strive to learn how to maintain or at least for areas they are unfamiliar, hire someone to fix or update where necessary.
I really appreciate all above points especially the “feedback from visitor” one <- this is one of the most important point that every webmaster must think of .. Afterall , the visitors are the best persons to judge your website and their feedback would not only make your website better but also help you to build a bond/relationsip with visitors.
I love your tips for Better webmaster. you give a very good idea about the webmaster tricks, thanks I will must consider these in futures
thanks for sharing this cool post
I really wish to become a better blogger and webmaster your tips gonna help a lot
thanks a lot 😀
I know I need to be a better webmaster and manage my websites with more ease and fluidity, but I have had difficulties managing and prioritizing my blog. Your tips are really helpful!
Hi Nile,
thank you so much for the great tips and the definition of a ‘Webmaster’
Is there a female version, like in German there is. Webmistress does not sound right to me.
One thing I started doing recently is changing my affiliate links to ‘no follow’ thanks to a blog post by Kimberly Castleberry.
I really appreciate coming to you blog to keep up to date and learn things.
Cheers,
Yorinda
Blogs like this are great to remind us all that the web is no different than running a traditional business where we are face to face with our customer.
I think you said it all.
Very nice summary about what a Webmaster really is.
and i just would like to add 1 thing,
remember to keep the size of your pages small. No one likes to wait 5 minutes for a page to load. Try to keep the load time within 30 seconds for your home page.
Cheers.
Nile,
As a webmaster myself, I just love your list. I recently went to a WordPress website for a local “social media marketing expert”. I clink on the link to her 30 video tutorial WordPress course just to see what she was offering compared to all the free WordPress Video Tutorials that I give away. I must admit, that I laughed my rear end off when the link to her products page did NOT even work. I got the feeling that she had not checked this link out in Many, many Months! So sad. She lost tons of credibility with me when one of Her Own digital products (NOT an affiliate product!) could not even be accessed. So you are so correct in pointing out that product links and information must be updated. Thanks for the reminder!
~ Jupiter Jim
That happens a lot. I recently saw some links come up in my Webmaster tools for 404 errors and was surprised at first, but I have done some restructuring and apparently forgot to apply some necessary redirects. Although the number was under 300, and it wasn’t really effecting my site too much, I still have been working on redirecting and even removing links.
Did you contact the woman and tell her about the site not working? Despite losing faith in her, it is always courtesy to let them know… and even if they might be in the same niche.
I really appreciate all above points especially the “feedback from visitor” one <- this is one of the most important point that every webmaster must think of 🙂 thanks for the article
Really helpful and interesting article thank you very much for sharing this keep it up 🙂
Thank you for your post, I look for such article along time,today i find it finally.this post give me lots of advise it is very useful for me .i will pay more attention to you ,i hope you can go on posting more such post, i will support you all the time. 🙂
Thanks for the great list! it’s certainly valid both for webmasters and bloggers. As to the forms of contact with readers, I’d add that f you have a website, you need either get a blog with comments enabled to here form your visitors, or add the forum with the button from each of your articles – discuss it – do that you don’t loose contact with your audience
Thanks Nile for the tips. I hope I can become a good webmaster. I don’t know if I can follow all your points but I will do it.
Hi Matt! I am sure you will do fine. 🙂
I will try the techniques you give, maybe after I read some truth to try seo techniques for most webmasters.
Sounds good suggestions. Surely if you want to be a good webmaster, I believe you should follow all the tips you mentioned in your article! Finally, about feedback from your customer is something that I hadn’t in my mind but now I will do it!
To be a good webmaster is not a easy job. I think it must have more patience and persistence. Right?
It definitely takes both of those when building and maintaining a website.
Thanks for your nice info, but don’t forget, writting good content and original.
Hi Nile,
A much needed topic of discussion for me. Web-mastering abilities is indeed a need for a blogger. The tips here are really useful.
Apart from this a comment made by you on my recent post was about Blogs and CMS. I came back to your blog which is maintained like site justified you comment that blogging platforms are to be used like CMS. You have applied quality web-mastering here and loved the way you have maintained this blog.
Thank you for sharing some exceptional tips to become a better webmasters. This will help me and other webmasters a lot to manage websites better.
Thanks once again. 🙂
Hey Nile,
That was a well written article on the webmaster. Yep, the changes should be updated immediately. To become a webmaster you have to work equally in every sphere of blogging whether it is writing, maintaing your blog post, layout of your blog etc. Also it needs time and patience for becoming a webmaster. 🙂
Ah, these are painfully timely reminders for me, Nile. There’s so much to do when we are solopreneurs, but this is one aspect I have to remember to add to my ongoing list of hats 🙂 This is part of working on my business instead of just working in it.
Very good list, Nile. I’ve designed websites for a few people, and many of them at least know a bit about how to maintain it. Then there are others who want to start a website, but when I present all the upkeep that it entails, they get cold feet, thinking that it would take too much time, or they need to be tech-savvy. A lot of people really only have a vague idea what they want a website for as well. I just don’t have the time to ‘maintain’ these sites for them. Kind of sad, really.
Nile I enjoyed reading this article, on how to be a better webmaster. This is a really cool site about internet marketing and technology. Keep up the outstanding work! Cheers, Matt
I really appreciate all above points especially the “feedback from visitor” one <- this is one of the most important point that every webmaster must think of thanks for the article.
Thanks for sharing this post. It is very important for SEO masters to become a good blogger and webmaster.
Hey Nile
You are right that Becoming a webmaster is not so easy task. If anyone thinks to make his/her future in blogging then they need to enhance few quality in herself/himself to become a successful blogger. According to me,
1. Need to become hardworker.
2. Need lots of dedication for blogging.
3. Should have creative mind.
4. Passion and Patience both are important.
Well thanks for sharing this post.
A web master is the main advisor to make a good website for the visitors. The advices of webmaster help you to offer a good and informative platform for the viewers. So you have always seek out the experience and skilled person to make some new ways and challenges.
Thanks…
Nile, I appreciate all your great tips.
Thank you.
hello nile
i think to be a good webmaster we need some good reserach thanks for sharing this cool post
I really wish to become a better blogger and webmaster your tips gonna help a lot
thanks a lot will share it with my other friends too
regards
sakshi