 Francis Morris, CEO of AskMorris.org, was asked to address the students at the prestigious Taipei American School (TAS) on May 19, 2006.
It was ‘Career Day’ at TAS, and Francis Morris was there to discuss careers in the Internet field with an eager group of TAS students.
Francis explained that a careful evaluation of how the Internet industry evolved was key to understanding where the Internet field is headed.
In the early days of the web, a company hired a designer to build a web site and post it on the web. Done.
Then the company decided they needed someone to maintain the server that hosted their site, and the position of ‘server administrator’ was born. (This task was often dumped on the web designer, who usually had little idea how a server functioned).
But displaying and maintaining a site wasn’t enough; how could the average viewer interact with the company? A form of some type was needed to facilitate two-way communication. A new job position was thus created: programmer. (Again, the web designer was often pressed into learning a programming language on top of server maintenance).
With increased communication came an increase in problems. Companies soon learned that their web sites weren’t particularly ‘user-friendly’. Viewers complained that they couldn’t find what they were looking for or that many sites were hard to navigate. Enter the ‘interface/usability’ expert. (And another job responsibility was foisted onto the now over-whelmed web designer).
But what good was having a well-maintained interactive easy-to-use website if no one could find it? Search Engines were accounting for more and more traffic to a site and the search engines seemed to be altering their methods of crawling and indexing web pages every week. Now a ‘search engine optimizer’ was needed. (“Hey web designer, have you got a minute…?”)
And now companies everywhere are adding advertising on the internet to their arsenal of marketing tools But what kind of ads work best? Is PPC (pay-per-click) a good investment, do banner ads really work? Are pop-ups still effective or a waste of money and bandwidth? How does bidding on keywords compare to traditional forms of advertising? Which is most cost-effective? What provides the best ‘rate of return’? Time for the ads campaign expert to join the web team. ("Do you think the web designer would have some time to look into this......?")
Francis addressed all these subjects as a means of pointing out that one over-worked web designer couldn’t possibly know enough to do ALL these jobs well; a team of specialists are needed and that that is where the future of Internet is headed. A good web designer has to know a little bit of everything in order to understand what is and what isn’t doable, but today’s prospective IT student should pick a field of interest and specialize in that one specific area.
Did the students at the Taipei American School understand the message?
The number of students asking to intern at AskMorris was proof positive that the speech had indeed achieved its desired effect. To be mentioned is also that two weeks after the speech was given, AskMorris accepted its first Intern from TAS.
Her name was Melody Kwok and she did a fantastic job during her internship at AskMorris in June 2006
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