Your website is in on the fritz and you're in a bit of a dither. Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters? The fire brigade? Dr. Spock?
Of course not!
You need a webmaster. A pro. Someone who can just sort that sucker out with a minimum of fuss. No excuses, no procrastination, no screwups.
So what would someone like that look like?
1. Experience.
When you tell him the problem, he ought to be able to recall past experiences of it. "Oh yeah, that's very common, I can sort that easily. I remember one time ...". A webmaster who is a webMASTER should have years of experience in putting out fires in websites.
This means uploading, updating, configuring and moving websites. You'd be surprised at how many little things have to work right for your website to go online and stay online.
2. Technical Expertise.
A webmaster should be proficient in things like PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Cpanel, Linux, Photoshop and Apache web server. These are standard technologies used to tart up a website, get it online and keep in there. Usually, a site can be simple HTML or they can be PHP based or a mix of the two.
Some sites are totally script-based. These are called CMS (Content Management Systems). A popular one is Wordpress. It lets someone who is not a webmaster to add content to a website, easily. The downside is that it needs a database called MySQL to store the data. This, plus the scripts, makes it more complicated. More complication means it's more likely something will break down.
This is when a webmaster steps in and fixes the problem. He should also explain what the problem was and what he's done.
3. Explains Things Simply.
There's a lot of technical stuff that goes into running a website. Not everyone understands this. Some folks don't even know how their PC works. This is not a failing. Most people don't know how their motorcar works but millions of them drive to work and back happily daily.
Web technical matters can be explained in simple terms. As long as your webmaster does what you require, that's the important thing. However, it helps if you know what he's doing. A bad webmaster obfuscates what he does so you don't cotton onto how incompetent he is.
4. Works To Schedule.
A good webmaster, if he says it'll be done Tuesday, it'll be done Tuesday. Properly.
A bad webmaster underquotes for the work involved and then does it late or badly or not at all. It's very common for a bad webmaster not to reply to your emails when he realises that he's effectively being paid 3 quid an hour, even though it's his own fault.
