Webmasters specialize in the upkeep, updating, and other elements of keeping your website maintained once it is built and published. Your site isnt going to take care of itself, so you need someone to take care of it for you; odds are that once your art business takes off, you will want to spend more time creating and marketing your art.

Think of it like this: if you had a traditional business, youd hire someone to clean the building at the end of the day or on a weekly basis, wouldnt you? Well then, why wouldnt you hire someone to clean up your website and keep it in working order so you dont have to worry about it? It just makes sense.

If this isnt enough to sell you on hiring one of the many qualified webmasters to help with your website, youll surely change your mind the first time that the site crashes and youre left high and dry. In order to have a successful business, it needs to be fully operational at all times. Thats why you need a webmaster.

The going rate for a good webmaster is $45-$100+ an hour. Most will prorate in 15-minute increments. Additionally, some actually prefer to be paid on a per-project basis. You can also find more affordable services by getting a full service company to help build, maintain, and market your website. Youll pay them one flat rate for all services, which should save you some money and allow you to budget. However, even though business start-up is costly, you should always put quality above cost when it comes to your website.

Sitemaps are a great way of telling Google what pages you want to be indexed. Google will index your site regardless of using a sitemap, however, this tool makes it easier for Google to index those pages you want it to. You can exclude pages if you really want to, but you can use a generator to create the XML formatted file.

One of the things Google hates is duplicate content, even worse is duplicate Titles and Descriptions (These are the important Meta Tags) Webmaster Tools will allow you to see if there are any pages with duplicated titles or duplicated descriptions. This is a very important tool to get the most out of these tags.

Once Google has crawled (indexed) your website, you hope all of your pages are visible in the index. This tool can help you find out if Google had problems finding and pages. Obviously, if Google can find a page, it wont be in the search engine listings. This can be bad links, moved content or other easily picked up issues.

This shows all of the links into your website from other pages on the internet. The best thing is the link on the right hand side that allows you to see all of the inbound links. (Note: this does not show all of the times your website is mentioned, only the working links people can click on to find you) In basic search engine terms, the more inbound links the better for you

This one is bit more advanced and will affect a smaller number of people. One of the key changes in Google's delivery of search results is the pre filtering that is done when you search. Google will filter your results, even if you don't ask it to. As an example, if you do a search for a topic and DO NOT select the web pages from this country button your results are still biased towards the country Google believes you are in. Alternatively, if you select the web pages from this country button, you will get results that Google think are directed to that country.

The Webmaster is a strange and varied beast, something of a jack-of-all-trades. The role demands an attitude that supports self-help, constant upskilling, and a vigilant eye on technology. A Webmasters responsibilities can vary greatly between organisations of various types and sizes.

It's not unusual for a Webmaster to be expected to posses some skill and take part in a range of traditional IT roles for web related services or projects.range of traditional IT roles for web related services or projects.Irrespective of who traditionally performed them, following are some typical tasks that are potentially a Webmaster's responsibility in a larger organisation with one or more web servers..

An Author is any one of potentially hundreds (or thousands) of people who will actually be responsible for collating content and publishing it in some form on your web server/s. Anyone can supply content, but not everyone is likely to be actually publishing as such. In a large organisation, people are often assigned to the role of content authoring, or administering. The more a Webmaster can pass on to these distributed web owners or custodians, the easier it is for them in turn to pass on knowledge or skills to staff within their team, department or workgroup thus freeing up more time for the Webmaster to focus on the other tasks listed on this page.

Authors will generally need some knowledge of HTML even if they are mainly using a WYSIWYG editor to publish content. With a background in HTML an Author is more likely to be able to fix a problem page themselves, rather than pester the Webmaster for support. Although as a Webmaster you will be expected to have a thorough understanding of HTML (and other supporting technologies), you may not neccessarily be a skilled trainer. It is often more effective to outsource generic HTML training to a company that specialises in such things.

You might then provide a supplemental session afterwards that focuses on peculiarities of your site and its design and the hidden things and traps that an Author will need to know when applying their new knowledge to publishing in your web environment. You should have at least a passing familiarity with all publishing tools that your clients are using. Not every author is going to be comfortable using a text editor or being shown how to fix something using a text editor when things go wrong.

Generating and analysing Log reports is a key task for the Webmaster. The more you know about how people are using your site the easier it is to maintain, or plan an upgrade or redesign. Often the Webmaster is asked to create personalised reports for a narrow area of a busy site, which is then passed on to the custodian of the content area so they can manage their own linking or promotion. Log reports are a standard offering that clients expect of an ISP or web host these days. Even if your not offering it to your clients now, you should be investigating different tools for your own purposes.

One problem with producing logs for clients is that the reports need to be all things to all people, a demanding requirement indeed. You will often get requests from clients for changes in format or presentation. Other than buying or developing an impressive tool that lets client massage their own output, you may find you have to present the client with some basic reports and/or the raw data and leave them to do their own thing.