Is Your Webmaster Certified?

If you are looking for a certified webmaster you are out of luck because there is no universal webmaster certification program. While many colleges and universities offer courses and training, their certification is just that, their own certification.

It is about as useful as a report card.

It sucks for webmasters, because there is no way for one webmaster to prove they are better than another webmaster.

Almost every industry has certifications from Auto Mechanics to Lawyers, there are exams, tests and standards they must follow to remain certified. Fr mechanics the SAE or Society of Automotive Engineers offers standards and Lawyers are regulated at the state level through State Bar Associations.

But webmasters are still out in the cold with no certification process.

Unfortunately for consumers, they have no way of knowing if one webmaster is better than the next and with the complexity of websites today, making mistakes in choosing the right webmaster could be very expensive indeed.

For good webmasters that is a problem because there are so many bad webmasters. In fact anyone with a computer is calling themselves a webmaster today because they can.

They don't have to know html, css, php or javascript. They don't have to know how to build graphics or even assemble pages, they only need to know how to spell the word webmaster and pronounce it.

I see people posting for webmasters on craigslist, which is about the worst place to look. If webmasters are trolling craigslist for work, then they are not very good webmasters.

They are going to tell you the can build you a website, sell you search engine optimization and convince you that it will bring business to you just by being online.

But why aren't they busy?

Why don't they build a website for themselves and have all the business they need?

Why are they on craigslist bidding your job and telling you you need to spend $2000 to get a $300 website?

With no standards in place and no place to look for information business owners have to make choices about who they should use and why.

Unfortunately, the problem we see day after day is when good webmasters tell business owners they wont have tons of traffic by building a website, the business owner goes to a webmaster that tells them what they want to hear.

$3000 later they calling us up and asking what we can do to help them, because they already spent $3000 and their website that does nothing for them, they can't change it without spending more money and they are broke, angry and out of time to make money that they expected to make with the website.

I remind them they called us first and we told them that was exactly what would happen.

Of course if you are going to pay someone $3,000 or even $300 they will tell you whatever you want to hear. Of course they told you traffic would start flowing in by the truckload when they optimized the website for you.

What do you expect them to tell you, THE TRUTH? If they did, you would go someplace else, like you did with us.

Now you realize we were right, honest and instead of using that $3000 to advertise, you want us to work a miracle when you have no budget left.

Sorry, it is too late.The money is gone and now you have nothing to work with, no opportunities, no choices.

Because we would advise you to spend $20 a month on the website and spend the other $2,980 on advertising.

But that is just human nature to look for the easiest solution, the one that promises the biggest return, and that is how people like Bernie Madoff make millions, by making you believe you will get rich, just spend a little more money.

But you can't blame the webmasters, because you fell for it hook, line and sinker.

It would be nice if there were some kind of regulatory board, but there isn't and people need to be smarter than that.

I remember one day a salesman come to my door asking if I needed the house painted. I asked how much and when I saw the price I commented how cheap that was. He told me, "Oh we get college students to do it, so we don't pay them much, just enough for beer".

Well, needless to say if I was going to have the house painted, it was not going to be by a bunch of drunk college students that have never picked up a paint brush before.

And I would like to think people would feel the same way about their website.

If you are going to hire a webmaster, make sure they have references, make sure they can produce working websites they built and talk to the site owners and find out if they are getting everything they were promised.

It does not seem like much to safeguard that $3000 but then again we have to build hundreds of websites to make that much money, so that seems like a lot to me. Maybe you roll cigars with $100 bills and you don't have to worry about it. Then again if you do, you probably wont make bad decisions like that.