Working With Designers, Developers and Webmasters

Let’s start with the website owner. If you are the website owner you’re probably looking at one of two scenarios.

a) You hired a web person or company to look after everything including purchasing and registering your domain.

b) You went online and purchased a domain yourself through a website like godaddy.com which may have also included a basic shared hosting plan as well.

If you fall into category a); you will probably want to read the ‘Domain Contact Info’ article. You also may want to hire a webmaster separately from your designers and developers. Your webmaster would only look after administration tasks such as creating email and ftp accounts or database users etc. This adds an extra layer of control to your web operations as well as additional control over your security. Designers and developers would not have access to your server or domain registration account, They should only be given temporary ftp accounts for their duration of involvement any part of a project.

For those website owners that fall into category b), you may still want to hire a separate webmaster if you don’t have the time to dedicate to all the necessary administration tasks as mentioned previously. For many small business owners, there is little or no time to deal with these tasks so a webmaster becomes a good idea. You can hire someone even if it’s only a couple of hours a month, or every other month. You should routinely look at your analytics data and with a busy small business, it can get overlooked or fall by the wayside completely.

If possible it’s nice to develop a more long term relationship with your webmaster so you can build trust and draw on their knowledge when there are large tasks at hand. If it becomes necessary to hire different designers or developers after the initial construction of your site, it’s good to have the common denominator of your webmaster to help oversee any major changes.