Taking webmaster skills for granted

It’s been emphasised to me recently how easy it is to take webmaster skills for granted.

I asked an IT guy - good with building PCs and networks, but relatively new to the internet - to set up a Wordpress install. After 6 days, he’s still struggling.

Yesterday I recommended a client - who is bringing significant changes to his site - to operate a blog to post news about his improving products list. I realised as soon as I used the word “blog” that I had confused him.

Despite that webmasters find it easy to communicate with one another and comment on various practical issues of using the internet, it remains a specialist set of skills.

What is especially being emphasised to myself is how easily these can be taken for granted by webmasters - and how easy it is to presume that everyone else can understand the language of webmasters.