Webmaster Apprenticeship Training

Leo translates apprenticeship training as berufsbegleitender Unterricht which is pretty much what this page should be about: Seminars for people who perform typical webmaster tasks as part of their job (at the MPDL). Since we got specialists on all sorts of web development on board, it shouldn't be too hard to recruit trainers.

Topics

• Tools: Firebug, validators et al.
• sitemaps
• email addresses in web pages
• rel="canonical" and more (rel="search", etc.)
• html/xhtml and which version?
• accessibility
• validating web pages
• usability (rupert?)
• logfile analysis
• strategies against spamming of web forms, etc.

What's a website made of?

The first thing to understand for a webmaster is what parts is a website made of and which ones can be manipulated.

The Meat

HTML

The Style

CSS

The Moving Parts

JavaScript

The Transport Layer

Last but not least: HTTP

Which systems do we have in use?

... and how can we poke around in them?

• The MPDL hosts a couple of blogs using a WordPress μ installation.
  • The HTML of a blog's pages is created by a PHP web application, using templates which are grouped in themes. To manipulate the HTML, theme files have to be edited and uploaded to the server.
  • The CSS for a blog is also part of the theme, so the same procedure as above applies.
  • The HTTP responses can mainly be manipulated via Apache httpd configuration.

Resources

• Google's webmaster blog http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/
• Jakob Nielsen's website on usability http://www.useit.com/
• Practical Tips for Government Web Sites (And Everyone Else!) To Improve Their Findability in Search http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/04/practical-tips-for-government.html

Max Planck Digital Library

Hypertext Markup Language

Cascading Style Sheets

HyperText Transfer Protocol

Hypertext Preprocessor

Open Source and Most Widely Used Web Server