The skills required to be a great webmaster

So building a website is no longer the great mystery that it used to be, but there’s a difference between building a website and building a website that’s successful and makes money. To me it’s a complete package of skills and you’re only going to be successful if you master (at least in part) all of them. Here’s a rundown of what I think it takes:

• Some technical knowledge. Note I’m only saying some because you don’t really need to be able to program to build a website, most out of the box platforms look great from the start e.g wordpress, but it is handy to know a little html.
• Design know-how. Again I’m not really talking about this from a technical point of view, just from the viewpoint that you know what looks good and what doesn’t. Having an eye for creating something that people find easy to use is also very important.
• Marketing. Probably the most important factor and worthy of more than just a paragraph here. However you really have to know what you’re doing here if you’re investing money into the business, the only real way to learn is to practice so it’s best to start with a small project/site before going crazy.
• Perseverance. Also very important and actually the one that causes the most failures. It can take much longer that you expect to create a successful site so how are you going to keep going? Also what if it fails completely, do you have the willpower to start again, most people don’t.
• Analysation. Fancy word but all it means is the ability to figure out what’s working/not working for your site and why. This could be anything from what your seo efforts are not successful to why visitors aren’t converting into sales. It’s that ability to interpret stats into action and to adapt what you’re doing that separates great webmasters from the rest.

Five points seems a bit sparse for what can be a huge process, still you always need a base to start from so I hope it helps. Part of the problem I’m finding with trying to document a lot of this website building process is there’s just too much to cover, plus the fact that everyone has their own process for doing things and overloading people with too much info could do more harm than good! Still I hope the tips above help if you’re thinking about starting a site.