Hi Everyone,

Today, we offer one editor's perspective on how the DMOZ experience has helped improve the core skills needed to effectively perform the duties of a webmaster. Please give a warm welcome to Arindra!

Emily

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Hi, my name is Arindra and I have been invited to write a bit about my experience as a voluntary editor on the Open Directory Project. One of my earliest recollections of DMOZ was... ummm well, to be frank, I am not sure because I have seen the green-looking site and its Submit Site button on multiple occasions on portals and search results since early 2000's. I am into web design (initially by interest and passion, and later on by profession) and what always used to strike me about this site was its structured presentation and its enormity. What currently interests me most is the involvement it has managed to garner among various people over the years and the immense amount of collective knowledge on a variety of domains.

I believe a webmasters' duties should include:

• Looking after the design, development and administration of the website and its related tasks;
• Assignment and categorisation of the works;
• Amassing and distributing knowledge on a particular topic; and
• Ensuring adherence to certain standards and maintaining quality.

By doing this, we ensure that we are serving the expected visitor with the expected resource.

DMOZ has been a pioneering project since the early days of the web. It is based on the idea of quality over quantity. It is about creating quality resources through a selection process. As webmasters, we are often presented with multiple options - multiple clients, multiple quote requests, multiple technologies, multiple software packages and tools. Although it might not be directly analogous, I would say deeper evaluation of each site submission and knowledge of proper category selection requirements as an Editor has changed my approach to taking clients and projects and selecting software.

In my experience, I have come across very learned webmasters inside the ODP community who understand the finer points of web design and development that we often forget. I have also come across teenagers, housewives and retired people who have never been directly involved in website development but yet have their own opinions and observations which are also extremely useful to a web developer. Often, such insights are not otherwise available to individual designers who are working without a full-fledged testing and debugging team.

As a volunteer editor, I have gained the experience of seeing a variety of non-English websites, and have been able to accidentally learn those languages to a small extent. Since most of us aim to build websites for international clients, I believe that this type of experience can only help us.

Initially I had written about selection and observation and making a choice. That is only one of the benefits. In the ODP, what is even more helpful is that there is very little space for individual mistakes. The category I edit, or anyone else edits, is edited not by me alone but by hundreds of other volunteers over time. Even if I make a mistake, it may be picked up and corrected by others when they review it. While doing a website for a client or a programming, it often happens that I cannot find my own mistakes. We now have a system in which a website designed or programmed by one person is mandatory to be reviewed by another colleague. It is not important whether the reviewer is junior or senior level, so long as it is reviewed.

One of the first things I should actually have mentioned earlier is that it is important to give your English spelling and grammar a good brush-up. Framing sentences, using verbs and creating summaries can only help any good webmaster. Think of how much this could help with your project plans, blogs, profile pages, etc. Let me tell you, there are immense discussions and FAQs available which could easily help you become a English writing superhero.

As I said, creating a resource ("Category" in DMOZ terms) is only a small part of the editor's job. Maintaining becomes the major responsibility. As an editor, you will learn how to maintain, inspect and develop categories which could help you gain experience in later on developing your own web property.

One of the things which should easily attract a webmaster or web designer to become an editor is that if you are a regional branch editor, you would get an idea of how many local companies have websites and surely this would be an aid to finding more clients.

I could probably ramble more and more on the topic and hopefully I will again, but my blog editor expects me to deliver I would like to stop here and allow more to be said on other interesting subjects.

Best regards
Arindra

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