Doing interviews

[John D]

Hey,
I am doing interviews for my webmaster forums.

I am interviewing a lot of webmasters of large sites or networks.

I have never done an interview before so I am trying to think what type of questions I will ask.
The main thing is asking questions that will benefit budding webmasters with their own sites but also not doing anything too personal that they wouldn't want to answer.

Here are a few things I came up with:

Can you give us a short introduction to yourself and your website(s)?

When did you create your first website and what was it?

What is the most important lesson you have learned about managing sites and what was one of your most common mistakes when you started out?

What do you consider as your main accomplishments?

How many hours do you work daily and what are your daily tasks for your sites?

Do you work alongside anyone else? What do they do?

What do you normally do to relax in your free time?

Tell us something about yourself that we don’t know.



Anyone have any suggestions or tips?

Thanks :)

[Tyler]

If you need a "guide" feel free to use:

http://www.forumuniversity.com/campus/classes-and-caps/t-interview-micheal-phpbb-support-team-leader-114.html

Generally what I like to do is an establish a decent introduction of who they are, and a very brief summary of what they do before I dive into the interview. I then start out the questions at the personal level, getting to know the man (or woman) behind the username :) I then move onto what their background is...in Micheal's case, it was phpBB. Does that help at all?

[John D]

That's great, thanks Tyler :)

[writespeak]

A few more suggestions:

- Tailor your questions to your interviewee.
- Keep your audience in mind. Do they know the interviewee? What will they want to get from the interview?
- Aim for specifics as well as general questions. Try to bring out the interviewee's specialized knowledge.
- Ask the interviewee what s/he'd like to be asked that you didn't ask.

You could also write more questions than you need and then ask your interviewee to choose which ones to answer. That way, you'll be more likely to avoid any questions that might fall flat, and you may get more detailed answers in areas that the interviewee is particularly interested in.

Lois

[John D]

Did an interview :)

http://www.webmasterforums.net/showthread.php?t=8543

What do you think?

[John D]

Done another interview a few days ago and I have another one lined up.

My problem now is I don't want all the interviews to have too many of the same questions.

I have started adding in more questions specific to their sites but I still want to have generic enough questions that will help other webmasters that run sites that are completely different.

Any tips appreciated :)

[Aussie Bob]

Interviews are good. I've done a few of them. Try and interview folks that have done something different, or have created great success. I think you can get personal, and don't be afraid to ask the personal questions, and not just the run of the mill questions.

All and all, I think interviews are a great way to add some dynamic content to your site.

[John D]

Just did another interview today and have it online now.

(Are we allowed to post links here? Just saw no spam in the guidelines but not sure what that covers :))

I asked more questions about the site in this interview, looks pretty good and the interviewee was great, he gave really detailed answers to all my questions.

I'm hoping to do at least a few interviews every week with well known webmasters - I think it will get return visitors, content for search engines to spider and in most cases, a back link which will normally be on a site getting a lot of visitors daily.

[SoftWareRevue]

Post a link if it helps clarify something. :)

If spam ever becomes a problem around here, we'll put up more detailed guidelines.