It’s a lonely life being a webmaster. Everything takes more time to do than you actually have available (assuming you need food and sleep) , and as soon as one set of issues is sorted out, something else looms out from the digital night to sabotage your site.

The first tip is to always mainntain a good relationship with your developers, and whoever is responsible for the site hosting if this is handled separately. I’ve watched in speechless joy at soaring sales and massive profits from a well-crafted email campaign from the online marketing unit, get the landing page disabled by the web team as the traffic threatened to crash the server. The lesson here - if you are planning a high traffic campaign, let them know well in advance so they can balance the loads! On the other side of things, if your web sales aren’t going well, check how fast those conversion pages are loading up. Slow servers usually mean fed up customers going elsewhere.

It’s also a good idea to fill your marketing department in on the basics of SEO. For those that don’t enjoy having to re-write every single page on a website, getting your marketers to understand the importance of keyword research and web copywriting skills will spare you an aneurysm or two. Otherwise, you can expect to have either nothing at all, or at best material that has been recycled from other sources such as print copy for products, hardly suitable for the web and possibly appearing in several other places on the internet. Getting people into the habit of charting their keyword results regularly, and reinforcing this with progress reports via the web and your site analytics should eventually persuade them to be carrying this out for themselves.

Be kind to designers. Web design, if correctly executed can be the killer feature of a website. Make sure your designers understand the goals behind the site, and don’t crowd your call to action or conversion links several inches below their masterpiece in After Effects that takes up the entire browser screen. Most designers are aware of the technical limitations of whatever package they are using, but many don’t appreciate that the attention span of a user is severely limited and many will not bother with all the nuances of the creative as they are merely looking for a relevant plain blue hyperlink.