Getting the Most Out of Your Webmaster
Webmaster Overview
The Webmaster position is unique within the county ITS department. The Webmaster is not a technician and does not do most of daily computing tasks that the technicians handle for county employees. This is a benefit to the county as it allows the Webmaster to be able to focus energies on web development tasks.
The Webmaster handles many websites for many departments within the county. As such, the Webmaster must manage many ongoing projects simultaneously. Often times these projects are transparent to everyone but the department for whom the work is being done.
The Webmaster generally does not generate content for departmental websites; content for various webpages should be generated by the department or someone delegated to do so for the department. For example: the Chocolate Department has decided it needs a website containing general information about the department, hours the Chocolate Department's staff is on hand to the public, other contact information, and a form to lookup who owes the department cocoa beans. In this scenario, it would be the responsibility of the Chocolate Department to provide to the Webmaster the following:
- an electronic document (i.e.: email, Word document, etc.) with the general information
- an electronic document with the hours of operation
- an electronic document with the contact information for the department
- some sort of electronic exported report pertaining to the owed cocoa beans
It would be the responsibility of the Chocolate Department to do any content editing, spell checking, typo zapping, etc. before submitting their information to the Webmaster.
It would be the responsibility of the Webmaster, in this scenario, to take the submitted content and format the static information such that it fits the styles associated with the main site. It would also be the responsibility of the Webmaster to write the corresponding code such that the exported report pertaining to owed cocoa beans could be searched and displayed on the webpage.
Departments generate their own content and submit it to the Webmaster. The Webmaster does the styling and coding necessary to make the content fit with the existing site(s).