Certification Magazine - November 2007 - (Page 28)

Planning a career as a webmaster? Check CertScope, which lists more than a dozen CertMag articles on the job role, as well as 115 Web sites. Nathan Hall is a webmaster for Chili Interactive, a Web design company based in Colorado. As a webmaster, Hall’s background is at the opposite end of the spectrum as Tosi’s science foundation — Hall came to the IT field with a studio arts degree from the University of Colorado, which has led him to concentrate more on front-end Web site design. Hall got out of school at the beginning of the dot-com boom, starting as a designer and then seeing his job role bloom into the more widely rounded capacity of a webmaster. He said the job tends to break off in two paths. “One is coming from the whole engineering perspective into the webmaster role,” he said. “The problem with this is you miss half of what you do as a webmaster in terms of being able to do any design work and adjust any front-end display. Once the site is built, that’s something that happens quite frequently.” Hall identified the other path as coming from a design perspective. “I came from designing the front-end usability side, focusing on the usability of the site and designing the cascading style sheets, programming HTML and working with engineering teams,” Hall said. He added that right out of college, he took care to grasp as much of the engineering component of Web design as he could. “That has helped me because I’m able to fulfill more of the needs of the client,” Hall said. “If a hard-core engineering piece comes up, I have the knowledge to at least get the right person and fix it. Once you learn the engineer’s needs, if you focus on the client’s needs, you become the middle man, and as the webmaster, that’s primarily what you are a lot of the time.” This is where, again, being all things to all people and having excellent project management skills come into play. “It’s being able to juggle the needs and priorities of all your clients so that you’re not making someone a nonpriority when they shouldn’t be,” Hall said. “You’re able to look at the task at hand and see if it’s something that needs to be done immediately, needs to be done in four hours or can be done at the end of the week. You want to have a clear idea of when the work’s going to be done and when you’re going to be able to fix the problem, or at least be able to illustrate the issues at hand.” Of course, long hours are part of the equation. Situations like this point to a need for webmasters to have solid communication skills. “Because we do work with marketing and also work with people inside the Exchange who are not technical, we have to have the communication skills to take what they want done and transfer it to our language and then take what we’re doing and transfer it back to their language,” Tosi said. When his team is not engaged in a large site rebuild, on a day-to-day basis, Tosi is still engaged in enhancing the site and researching new technologies that could allow for improvements to the site. “Because the Web changes so frequently, I’m always looking around, trying to see what the new technologies are, what’s coming up,” Tosi said. “We’re a Java shop here, but I’ll look at whether it makes sense to use Ruby on Rails for certain applications, whether it makes sense to use PHP, what technologies fit in, where to use other technologies, just to get the best overall user experience.” Tosi requires this level of versatility from everyone on his team. “What I’ve been preaching to my team as far as our own processes is that I want the right solution to the problem,” he said. “I don’t want them to just say it has to be XYZ because we do XYZ. So, for example, if the Web site’s pulling slow, I need my team to be familiar with Linux to be able to find out if it’s an HTTP setting in the OS itself, or is it something at a larger level, is it a firewall group blocking something? While we don’t get very deep into everything, we have to be varied in our exposure.” A Juggling Act As is the case with many IT job roles, there doesn’t seem to be a standard academic and training background and career path for webmasters. “There’s really no typical approach,” Tosi said. “I think it’s just your imagination and where your creativity takes you.” 28 CERTIFICATION MAGAZINE November 2007 http://www.certmag.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Certification Magazine - November 2007

Certification Magazine - November 2007 Contents Editor's Letter Data Stream Tech Careers Academic Connection Dear Techie Virtual Village Certification Outside Technology Inside Certification The Webmaster: Online Everyman Interface Time Tips: How to Fit Certification into Your Schedule Ad Index Endtag

Certification Magazine - November 2007

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