What Your Mother Should Have Warned You About Webmasters, But She Didn't Know Better...

Or... Why every business owner should be his/her own webmaster...

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

Once upon a time the famously notorious - notoriously famous - rock band Dead Kennedys wrote a song entitled "Kill the Poor" (See their 1980 record: "Fresh Fruits For Rotting Vegetables").

Although I am not suggesting that we kill all webmasters, but it is more than high time to start curtailing their power, so they can't ruin as many businesses as they have in the past. This is a pretty harsh comment, but it is a fact. Some 96% of websites are dead in terms of producing money for their owners, and in most cases webmasters are single-handedly responsible for this disaster.

I propose it is time for business owners start taking charge of their websites and they really act as business owners, not as indentured servants to their webmasters.

I'd worked with several sizeable companies over the years that were literally in the hands of their webmasters, and when webmasters decided to move over to greener pastures, they forgot to give the login information to their by then former employers.

Just for the record: This is not a general opinion of webmasters, just a collection of observations. Some webmasters are good, some are great, some are amazing, some are terrible and some are plain unethical and should be shot. I simply encourage business owners to take charge of their own websites.

In fact what is happening with webmasters today is similar to what happened to Y2K consultants in 1999. Many false Y2K experts painted a picture of doom and gloom, scared the shit out of some honest folks, who then forked out a small fortune just to let these scumbag bastards fiddle with their computers. Because of my computer and biomedical engineering background, I led several Y2K compliance projects in hospitals and medical establishments, and I dare to say the whole Y2K stuff was blown out of proportions. People managed their computers without "experts".

Today the same is happening with webmasters. Many of them fool their clients out of their money, although they know that with a little teaching their clients could do 90% of this magic "webmastering stuff".

Actually do you know what so many webmasters and the Spanish inquisition have in common?

They try to keep their victims in the dark by misrepresenting their crafts to them, and telling them that they are essentially too stupid to comprehend the stuff, and should blindly trust the "experts".

And over the years the Spanish inquisition murdered more people and stole more goodies than any garden-variety mortal could wrap his brain around.

The same way, by convincing people that they are too dumb to manage their websites, many webmasters have created incredible dependency for their clients.

Yes, the webmastering profession is getting more and more complicated by the minute, but most people are perfectly capable of implementing day-to-day webmastering for themselves.

Imagine if you will. Liz engaged a webmaster to look after the website of her business. Jeff's fee was a reasonable $75 per hour.

Jeff set everything up for Liz, made the requested changes and every month invoiced Liz for $500-700. And She paid. And again... and again... and again. She paid because he told her that managing her website was far beyond her intellectual league, and she needed an expert like Jeff on a permanent retainer. And she believed him. She accepted that managing a website was beyond her expertise.

And one day she emailed Jeff with some changes, and the email bounced back. Then she tried to phone him. The phone was disconnected.

At that point she started frantically rummage through her office to find the login names and passwords to her website and the related utilities. No passwords. Now she was sweating bullets…

At this moment she knew it was not only her website dead and gone, but her whole email database, and newsletter subscriber list. A list she had been building for years was dead and gone.

And the story goes on and on...

So, what four-letter words would you use if this every-day problem happened to you?

Or...

Has it actually happened to you yet?

If it has, then you are one of the victims of the many business owners who have been kidnapped by their webmasters.

Here are some problems are recent survey revealed about webmasters. I am fully convinced that webmasters should be used as doctors on a situational basis, not as experts on permanent retainers.

1. Webmasters are too expensive - The main problem here is that most webmasters work on a time-based fee basis, and time-based fees both penalise genius and encourage inefficiency. Since most of them are pathetically ineffective in marketing their own services, they dig their claws into their clients and then hang on for dear life and dear payments. When you ask "How much will this all cost?", they very often say, "My rate is XX per hour and I have no earthly idea how long it will take. You will find out at the end". They basically ask you to write a blank cheque, and it is up to their consciousness, how fat they make that cheque for themselves.

The main problem is that in a time-based structure, you pay for the amount of time and effort dispensed by the webmaster. But this is a communist approach as explained by Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto...

"A commodity has a value, because it is a crystallisation of social labour. The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it; that is to say, on the relative mass of labour necessary for its production. The relative values of commodities are, therefore, determined by the respective quantities or amounts of labour, worked up, realised, fixed in them. The correlative quantities of commodities which can be produced in the same time of labour are equal."

Stay away from "communist" webmasters.

2. Web designers often fail to give useful cost estimates - Yes, there are unforeseen circumstances, but they still should be able to give you a reasonable estimate. However, since - again - most of them work on hourly rates, they can stretch any project as long as necessary. Now you may say, they don't do that because it is not ethical. I have news for you. Do you drive faster than 90km/h on the highway? Probably. And how many people do you know who have radar detectors and drive faster than the legal limit? Probably a good few. Parkinson's Law says that the task expands depending on the time allotted for it. Guess what. When your webmaster is working on your website, there is no time allotment. Any time gets invoiced to you, and you pay.

3. Web designers take too long to do the work - There is a problem. webmasters want to create superb kick-butt portfolio pieces which every living creature can drool over in admiration, whereas you want something reasonably quickly and effectively. What they fail to realise is that when they are 80% "there", the website is ready to go. The final 20% will make very little difference as far as the business usability of the website is concerned. So, make sure your webmaster doesn't get bogged down doing personal portfolio work on your dime.

5. Most websites are over-designed, and are not result-oriented - Many webmasters fail to inform their clients about additional costs to make websites work. Webmasters are only too happy to take their clients' full budgets on design, so when poor clients find out about the costs of marketing their sites to actually attract business, they freak out. They have just spend the king's ransom on the design itself, and by now have no money left in the piggy bank to market their sites, so many of those sites become "loss centres" for business owners. Actually some 94% of the websites out there don't even break even.

6. Most websites are not upgradeable or maintainable by a their owners - Since many webmasters are pathetically atrocious at marketing their own services, when they get their clients, they try to lock them in for long term contracts by offering them to update their sites and doing small modifications. The fact is that most clients with minimum wordprocessor knowledge can make modification. Graphics doesn't have to be modified that often. I know people (including my clients and me) who use garden variety text editors (like Windows' Notepad) to modify their pages with amazing success, and then use a free FTP utility (like Filezilla) to upload pages to their websites. It is no more complex than driving a car. That is not rocket science. If your webmaster tries to push you into keeping them on a monthly retainer to do small changes, then you had better run very fast and very far.

7. Webmasters often impose their taste on their clients - Many webmasters don't listen to what their clients want. They want to dazzle clients with mouth-watering technology. Graphics designers want to amaze their clients with eye-popping design. In a sense it is just like walking into a store wanting to buy a basic word processor, but commission-based salespeople try to sell you the most expensive computer in existence simply because that will make the highest commission for them. What you want is irrelevant.

8. Many webmasters view their sites as a piece of art not as method of doing business - Many webmasters are either graphics designer or technicians, and very often ones who have been "paycheque" employees until they got downsized. It means they have no sense of how to run a business. This is fine and dandy of you want your website to be a nice piece of ornament, but if you want to use it as a profit centre, then you are in trouble. From a business standpoint your website is a marketing tool, and you had better treat it that way. Hint: Who has made more money on the Mona Lisa? The dude who painted her or the museum that manages her fate by exhibiting her? Make sure your web project is in the caring - co-ordinating - hands of a marketer, and doesn't get kidnapped by designers or technicians.

9. Many webmasters fail to understand how to educate their clients - As marketing genius, Jay Abraham says, "People are silently begging to be led." That is, clients are supposed to be educated on why a specific designer is the best for the job. Very often web designers have one option and that is it. They try to "force" that one option on their clients as the golden standard.

10. Many webmasters are pathetically poor writers and view content as mere filler - Can you imagine a brain surgeon or a commercial pilot who has attention deficit disorder? It would be a disaster. The same way, webmasters should understand that writing clear, compelling and convincing copy is just as important as brilliant drop-dead design. Or more. See a recent blog entry.

Summary

So, as you can see, there are ways of making sure that you get the right webmaster, but also make sure that only on a situational basis.

Delegating your website to a full-time webmaster is just as retarded as delegating your marriage to a full-time sex-manager who makes love with your spouse on your behalf and collecting good money for it from you.

Just consider this...

Do you get driven around by a chauffeur just because you don't know how the carburettor work in your car?

Do you have an electrician on permanent retainer just because you have a microwave oven at home? Of course not!

Do you have employ a full-time dentist just because you need a check-up every six months?

Then why are you wasting your money on a permanent webmaster?

The way I see it I don't need to know how the ins and outs of plumbing to have a toilet at home.

The Internet is the same. Just like the holy inquisition, many webmasters try to keep their clients in the dark in terms of what's happening on their websites.

Again, I don't say webmasters are fundamentally bad. Neither are elephants. But that alone is no reason for keeping either a webmaster or an elephant on the full-time payroll. Your business is your business. Make sure it makes money for you not for a webmaster.

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