Your website is an operation that runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.  To ensure your website is always online and running smoothly, it is important to have a good webmaster on board.  A webmaster is a "Jack of all trades" and must be skilled in many different areas such as web design, web development (programming), server management, web marketing and administrative functions.

Main Duties of a Webmaster
One of the main duties of a webmaster is to manage your website on a server.  With the blended skills of a web designer, web developer and software expert, a webmaster will have the technical skills to ensure that website visitors are easily able to access and assess your website pages and that all the features on your website are functioning well.

A website is very dynamic and will almost always require several changes during its lifetime.  Another main duty of a webmaster is to provide ongoing maintenance for your website.  A webmaster will be able to assist with the following: adding new content, adding new pages, corrections, changing graphics, redesigns, fixing broken scripts and hyperlinks etc.  A webmaster always keeps the code and documentation for your website so that any future upgrades or trouble shooting can be easily taken care of.

It is the duty of a webmaster to take care of the software (programming) aspect of a server.  For example; the installation of scripts like PHP and perl modules are managed by a webmaster.  A webmaster maintains these scripts so that they run at optimal level, ensuring your website runs at an optimal level on the host server.

Another important duty of a webmaster is the marketing of your website - directing visitor traffic to your website and to ensure that people surfing the web can easily find your website.   The way in which a webmaster markets your website is to do all that is possible to configure your web pages to allow the search engines to easily index them.

A webmaster will advise clients on new technologies and updates taking place in the world of the Internet and can provide sound advice on which new practices to adopt or discard.  A good webmaster will always consider feedback from site visitors, implementing this feedback to improve a website.

Lastly, a webmaster installs and configures your website on a host server.  He/She can also register your domain name.

Criteria for "how to choose a webmaster"

• Current in website creation and website enhancement
• Experienced with references you can contact and work samples for you to view
• Strong knowledge in search engine optimization techniques and implementation
• Will allow website owners full access for input or changes
• Excellent communication skills
• Can provide statistical analysis of website traffic
• Can offer affordable rates that are consistent within the marketplace
• Fully satisfy your project requirements, within budget and on schedule