Better webmasters needed

Asina Pornwasin

The Nation

The Thailand Webmasters' Association is aiming to raise the standard of Thai webmasters, focusing firstly on its 1,100 members.

Siwat Chawareewong, who was elected president of the association just a few weeks ago, said that in his two-year term he wanted to see more Thai webmasters gain skills and qualifications with international standards in four main areas: Web design, Web programming, Web marketing and Web content development.

He said that even though there were now more than 20 million Internet users in Thailand, most of the time they spent online was not with Thai websites.

The challenge for the Thailand Webmasters' Association is to increase the skills of Thai webmasters, because with higher qualifications, their websites will have higher quality standards and will attract more attention from Thai Internet users.

"For other activities, such as Internet security issues or content development, we will collaborate with the other organisations such as journalists, through the Society of Online News Providers and the Information Technology Press Club. We plan to concentrate on this core matter of webmaster quality, and how to be a qualified webmaster," Siwat said.

This year, the association will increase its regular activities called "webpressos" or workshops for members. Moreover, it will continue to create young-blood webmasters at an annual project called "iNet Young Webmasters' Camp", or iYWC.

This year's 9th iYWC will recruit 80 university students to take part in the four-day camp. They will be divided into four groups to learn design, programming, marketing and content-development skills. As well as these four areas, they will learn webmasters' ethics.

"Every year, we supply these young, qualified webmasters to the Internet industry. Most of the students from camps of the past eight years are now working as webmasters in many giant websites in Thailand," Siwat said.

Well-performed webmasters are expected to help Thai websites deal with the challenge of booming foreign sites, especially social networks.

"About five to seven years ago, when the Web was a one-way content environment, Thai-language content websites were popular and had a lot of traffic, but now, after the Web industry moved into a user-generated content environment, those websites are no longer as famous as they were," Siwat said.

He said the strength of Thai websites was their local content, and this meant local issues or matters of local interest, not simply local language. However, content alone is now not enough to attract people to stay longer at a website. Drawing people to visit and spend time at a site needs several factors other than content, including Web design, Web programming and marketing, he said.

-- The Nation 2011-10-18

Ha Ha Ha

<snip>in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king</snip>

thailand - the hub of basic HTML .........

<snip>in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king</snip>

thailand - the hub of basic HTML .........

Come on They do succeed to be basic AND heavy loaded AND IE specific. Not so many can say that!

And Thailand screams into the 20th Century.