Advice for the aspiring Webmaster

[Shadow]

Advice for the aspiring Webmaster (link)

So you've been on the internet for a while now.
You've surfed, searched, maybe even posted on
forums and just maybe even made a couple of
bucks selling stuff on eBay or even Amazon.

Now you have come to the point where you
have a twinkle in your eye and the desire to
make your own site and claim your own little
chunk of bandwidth and disk space on the 'net
but you realize one tiny little problem, you don't
have a clue where to start!

I've been on the net since the late 90's and I've
done and seen quite a bit in that time. I'm not
going to claim I have all the answers, I don't.
But I can offer you a few pieces of hard earned
advice...

1) There ain't no such thing as a stupid question.
All of us start out the exact same way, utterly
ignorant of what a WYSIWYG editor is, or what
an FTP client is, let alone what they're for.

Ask questions no matter how silly you think they are.
Anyone that laughs or mocks you doesn't merit your
attention.

2) Expect to spend long hours pouring over pages and
pages of Geek Speek.
A lot programmers and coders write manuals for other
geeks not us poor dumb bunnies that just want to build
a site and maybe even a small online home business. And
for this, I refer you to point 1.

When in doubt, ask.

3) Don't stress over not getting a lot of traffic for the
first year or so.
Most of your traffic will likely be friends and family or
If you've sold stuff online and had repeat customers
they might take a look at your new store to see if you have
anything they might want. Other than that the search
engine's bots will take their dear sweet time crawling
your site and the engines will take their dear sweet time
in getting off their butt's and putting you into their search
results.

4) Being a Webmaster is an art, not an exact science.
In four years, I've gone from a thumb fingered forum
poster, and small time eBay seller, that had only a nodding
acquaintance with punctuation to an "accomplished"
Webmaster. Have I mastered it yet? (ROFLMACO) Nope.
Every time I log in I learn something new...

and I still ask "stupid" questions.
 


See the link...

[beast]

my big question lately is copyright infringement and content liability.


Like Reuters for instance. I always thought re posting an article from them would be copyright infringement, but now they offer their stories on embedded video and invite you to share them on your site? 


Then, At what point is a webmaster liable for what content is published on their page? I could make a long list of don't do's and claims of not being liable. But, truth is. If you want to have a website with public publishing there should be some limited acceptance of liability in my eyes.

 When newspapers publish false stories we hole them liable. The same should maybe held true for Internet sites. Sometimes I think legal disclaimers also make the statement that a site isn't credible? 


and SPAM!!  It just sucks. How can you have a free open site to all without getting robot wars started? 

[Shadow]

Yeah, I have that same concern about copyright and content crap...


You probably have seen that fair use notice I have in my footer at
The Bastion. I don't really like it. But what am I supposed to do?
Never post news? Never post anything I didn't write myself and
then tell people they can't use it or post it somewhere else?


And I hear ya about the spam... The closest I have come to a work
around is that flash forum I installed. But that isn't what I really want.
I want guests to be able to post on the main forum.

[beast]

some spammer has started posting 20-30 posts a day from ip addresses completely different then i already have blocked.

It's a pain.


I might have to break down and use captcha there, But, I hate it because i hate when i have to prove i am human so i don't want to do it to other people too.

[Shadow]

There are only so many IPs that be blocked...

In the past I have had a lot of IPs blocked and always
wondered how many perfectly innocent people I was blocking.