Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Interview Questions for Prospective Website Managers

Before I left my previous job, I was asked to come up with some questions on what would be good job interview questions to ask of a prospective website manager. This is for a jack-of-all-trades and hands-on kind of manager that needs to know a lot of things to run a website. Here's what I came up with plus some new ones I just though of (in no particular order):
  • Can you describe a situation where you helped make a website more user-friendly? More client focused?
  • What would you say is a good measure of website performance that might not commonly be thought of?
  • Describe your experience with web analytics?
  • What are you thoughts on interactive media? Any success stories? Any caveats?
  • Which web authoring software do you use?
  • How proficient are you with HTML? With CSS? JavaScript? XML? ASP or PHP?
  • What methods of troubleshooting a problem with a webpage do you use? How do you uncover buggy code?
  • What's your favourite browser and why?
  • When testing which browser do you use?
  • How do you gauge if an online effort is effective?
  • Tell me about your experience soliciting feedback from your users? Which methods did you use and tell me which you found most effective? Any inexpensive or invaluable methods you recommend?
  • What is your graphic design experience or training?
  • What image editing software can you use?
  • What is the secret to effective web design?
  • Tell me you favourite website and why?
  • What's your least favourite website and why?
  • Which websites do you go to every day and what can we learn from them?
  • Do you have any experience with content management software?
  • Do you have experience with Adobe Acrobat? Making PDFs? Making interactive forms?
  • What's your level of familiarity with search engines? How important do you think they are?
  • What's your experience with email list software?
  • Any tips or caveats for email marketing?
  • Tell me about a successful use of social media that you worked on?
  • How familiar are you with databases and SQL?
  • What are some security issues should a website be concerned about?
  • Are the websites you previously worked on accessible? If not, why?
  • Tell me about how you used information architecture to help make a website more effective?
  • Have you written any article for print or online? Can we see samples of your work?
  • How proficient of a copy editor are you?
  • Give me an example of good or bad web writing?
  • How did you acquire your Internet skills? Self taught, on the job, school?
  • How do you keep in touch with trends in the industry? With new technical standards & software?
That seems like a daunting array of skills to have, but I know many website managers who are proficient at most, if not all, the above.

Every website will have unique needs, based not only on software used but also resources available, but I think I have got some standard items. This list is certainly not definitive, so I'd love to hear some suggestions.

2 comments:

Doug said...

Hi Glen, thanks for posting these. I'm helping to interview candidates for our web manager position (we're a large science museum in the Midwestern US). These questions will come in handy. Thanks again.
Doug

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