Advice with interviewing a webmaster

They have: 1 posts

Joined: Jul 2006

Hi guys, I work in a school and on Wednesday we are interviewing for a new webmaster/it technician. They are to have 2 half hour slots where they will be tested, the first half hour they will be required to fix some problems regarding hardware and the like.

I was wondering if anyone can think of a good task to set them to test their web design skills. Basically we need to ensure that they are competent and using Dreamweaver and probably Fireworks to some extent aswell. It would also be good to see how creative they are. It doesn't need to be anything too complicated, after all they will only have half an hour.

Hope that makes sense and thanks to anyone that has any good suggestions Smiling

Megan's picture

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

So you want this person to be able to fix hardware problems AND do creative web design. That is going to be a tough combination to find.

Testing creativity is going to be tough - I hate those weird interview questions that are lame attempts at trying to get you to think creatively on the spot. I think the best kind of creativity comes when you have some time to reflect on something. When interviewing for my current job I was asked ahead of time to come up with some suggestions for the department's current website. That was good, because I had time to think about it and came up with a list of things to bring to the interview. So asking what they would change about the current website would be good. They should also have a portfolio you can take a look at.

Otherwise I don't have any great ideas there. Using dreamweaver and Fireworks you could just ask them to create a button of some sort (it shouldn't have too much ghastly formatting applied, shouldn't use default Fireworks styles, and should be optimized for the web, web safe colours optional) and put it into Dreamweaver to the right of some text (this should NOT be done with the align="right" attribute or a table).

Busy's picture

He has: 6,151 posts

Joined: May 2001

I can think of two things but they might not be able to solve them with editor

Problem: make a tabled layout and use at least one rowspan ,once built change the rowspan to colspan
fix: change colspan back to rowspan

problem: make a layout using only CSS and make one div float over another
fix: (could be several) fix the div instead of float it

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