Press Release
Get Certified with Prentice Hall PTR and WOW
Upper Saddle River, NJ, November 1, 1998 -- Prentice Hall Professional Technical Reference (Prentice Hall PTR), the leading professional publisher, and World Organization of Webmasters (WOW), a non-profit organization dedicated to the education and certification of Webmasters, intend to jointly develop a curriculum designed to help Webmasters prepare for the official WOW certification.
Webmaster is one of the new jobs of the Internet-age, and one that spans a broad range of technical and business skills. A webmaster's duties may include graphic design, working with programming and scripting languages, system administration, site administration, as well as Internet sales and marketing.
With thousands of Web sites launching daily, Webmasters are in demand. Until now, no degree or certification has been available in this new, evolving, and fast-growing market. The need for competency standards and credentials for Web professionals is increasingly urgent. WOW has worked with academic institutions and industry leaders for more than three years to develop a webmaster certification and training program. This program is based on criteria adopted by the U.S. Department of Labor and provides two levels of webmaster certification. To earn this certification, Webmasters must demonstrate proficiency in three broad areas: technical, content management, and business.
A Level One Certified Webmaster will be able to identify, recognize and describe skill sets in three key areas:
- Web Business Management from financial issues to project management and marketing
- Content Management including user interface, authoring languages, multimedia and graphics
- Technical Management involving administration, protocols, performance, security and more
A Level Two Certified Webmaster will be able to identify, recognize and describe the skill sets in the three key areas, and will also be able to identify the issues surrounding the key areas, evaluate those issues, recommend and implement solutions. Level One certification is not mandatory for Level Two certification.
Prentice Hall PTR intends to publish four to six Certification Study Guides by next summer. Each Study Guide is to be integrated with a supporting Companion Web site. In addition, Prentice Hall PTR intends to publish WOW-certified interactive, multimedia CD-ROMs as part of its award-winning Complete Training Course Series.
Through Prentice Hall's Custom Publishing Program, the WOW-certified Study Guides are to be offered to universities, community colleges, technical schools, and high schools in a manner that will allow schools to pick and choose just those parts of the Study Guides they need for their courses.
Finally, Prentice Hall intends to make the entire set of Study Guides available in HTML for those schools interested in offering WOW-certified courses over the World Wide Web.
Look for more information about WOW's education and certification program by visiting http://www.joinwow.org/.