Skills for the novice webmaster
Congratulations, you are taking that first step onto the Internet for your business, passion or personal purpose. With a website, however, you have some skills that you will learn and master for yourself over time. In this blog post, let's take a look at what skills these might be. And how you can save time in this, to successfully and economically host your website with your partner in hosting.
There are a lot of skills that a novice webmaster has to learn, because a website needs a little more attention than many people might think. After all, a website needs to be designed, filled with content, kept up with security updates and the other tasks that pile up. Now Content Management Systems make this easier for you by providing convenient ways to do all this in a visual way without coding. But there will always be incidents that require you, the webmaster, to roll up your sleeves and get to work.
Being able to work accurately
Precise work is necessary in many professions, with a website you will always have to pay attention to which action or button you press. If you haphazardly change settings or click around in the DNS records or SSL settings, for example, your website may no longer be available. To avoid this, we recommend that you always orient yourself in the documentation we have made available in our knowledge base. And to make sure you can change a certain setting without major consequences. Documentation of your Content Management System like WordPress can certainly be used for this as well.
To give another good example, it often happens in the WordPress installation that the wrong MySQL or MariaDB host is entered. The fact is that we now have several that can be used and your website is on one or the other. These MySQL servers have different numbers that we put down in the client panel and control panel to use. You can then copy and paste this. To get ahead of errors. Also, for example, the prefix that is in front of the name of the database is required to be entered. And almost everything with websites is CapitalLetterSensitive. So always make sure you are using the correct data with almost every action on your website. And compare data in notepad, for example, to make sure you are using the "bare" text. And don't include hidden characters.
Quiet reading
Being able to read calmly and comprehensively is also a skill that will help you along as a novice webmaster, once you no longer just see a red square when an error message occurs. But the stack trace of the error message can only get you further as a webmaster. Error messages occur and can be caused by something as simple as not having the correct write permissions. Or not having the correct database information. If you can calmly read what an error message says and then look it up, any problems or conflicts with plug-ins can be solved very quickly!
Make website security a high priority
A website is scanned and visited several times a day by malicious bots, we as a hosting partner try to protect you from this with all kinds of measures as much as possible. But a website cannot be secured only at the server level, it is also required that you know how to secure the website itself. So passwords for each account or setting should not be a welcome12. And are best generated by our Password generators. This way you have a random and strong password, which in turn can be stored in a password manager.
It is also important to make timely updates and take certain steps to further secure your website. Look in the specific categories for your Content Management System in the knowledge base or consult the online chat for this. We always want to take a look with you to see what the best settings are.
Know how to look up any questions or problems
Being able to use Google and search engines is a great asset to any webmaster, simply enter your error message in Google, without your site parameters of course, and you can point to the solution. In fact, almost no problem is unique and there is a very good chance that someone has had this same problem before you and solved it. Forums like Stackoverflow are a goldmine for such problems. And are heavily used by anyone looking for a solution for their website.
With some handy tricks, you can also exclude Google search results or require that only one solution appears. Just take a look at Google to see what tricks you can use for this. This way you refine the search results even more to exactly what you need.
Knowing how to restore your website from a backup
An important skill you should have as a webmaster is to restore your website from a backup file. By default, these are two zip files if you followed the following article:
https://www.mijnhostingpartner.nl/client/knowledgebase/backup/automatisch-een-backup-laten-maken-scheduled-task/
And so it is necessary to know how to convert these two zip files back to a working website. Try this for example once on a subdomain, or test this out in a test environment. With this skill you can make sure that if for example an update breaks your website you can fix it. An indispensable skill to master as a webmaster.
This list of skills is just the tip of the iceberg of what skills you learn from running a website. Which ones do you think you can add to this list? Let us know via Social Media! We'd love to hear what skills you've added as a webmaster.
