Homer Smith

Your Part-Time Webmaster

Websites are easy, except when they're not

Do you have a website? If you're reading this, you probably already know that, even in 2025, having a website means:

Do‌es your website have a lot of finicky details? Do‌es it take up staff time—or worse, your time?

I've been making & managing websites since 1998, and in that vocation I’ve worked on everything from the Linux command line to e-commerce. I don’t know everything, but I am handy to have around.

Want to hear one thing I do know? Sometimes a website can be a real time sink if you don’t know what you’re doing.

So, let me ask you: How much is your time worth? Are you trying to prioritize other tasks besides HTML, graphic design, custom coding, SEO, eblasts, social media posts, and content management? Would you like to hire a reliable part-time webmaster for 2 hours and save yourself 10 hours of frustration?

Ask My Clients

With a long-running radio show, many published books, and several public art projects, we need a lot of web updates, social media posts, and eblasts. Homer kept our content up-to-date consistently over the long term. He's like a Swiss-army knife of web design, photo­shop­ping, copywriting, coding, and data. We'd recommend him to anyone who needs help managing anything online.

Laura Cortner, Executive Producer
21st Century Radio

I've worked with Homer for over 10 years. As a non-profit communications professional, I've brought him on for many projects and I've happily referred him to many people in my network. His initiative & attentiveness to potential issues, and his consistently good work in the time I've known him, make him asset to any operation.

Karen F.

The Chesapeake Film Festival had hard deadlines with a website that needed updating and a stable interface for advance ticket sales. Homer updated our website quickly, and continued to man­age our online presence for three festival seasons. Homer Smith is responsive and very capable, easy to work with under tight deadlines and requirements. Or­gani­zations that need a contractor with good problem-solving skills should con­sider hiring Homer Smith.

Cid Collins Walker, Executive Director
Chesapeake Film Festival

As a realtor of over three decades, I needed a website that would stand out. Homer took my brand ideas and made them happen. He explains everything without overexplaining the technical details and gives me informed recom­mendations as things change online. Hire him if you don't have any idea where to start, or even if you do!

Karen Ollier
#1 Agent, 2016-2018
Irongate Realtors, Dayton, OH

What story are you telling?

By now, I have a few stories about time and money. I can tell you about when...

How do you navigate today's web? How do you know where to use AI, where to use a CMS, and where to use JS? How do you even know what tools to consider?

With experience.

These are the kinds of stories—this is the kind of experience—that you need in your back pocket when you're figuring out the future.

Let's Talk About Your Website

Do you want your website fixed right away if it breaks, and not just when the tech support responds to your ticket? Do you want your sales inventory updated when you need it to be, and not just when someone can squeeze it in? Do you have frequent updates, and need your mailing lists and social media profiles synchronized and up-to-date, instead of going quiet for months at a time?

Me too. If you have an online presence already and you want someone managing it, I work primarily on a subscription basis. It's better to make sure my clients have my time guaranteed in the coming month, no matter what comes up. There are three tiers, depending on your operational needs.

I also have options for irregular tasks or one-off projects. And if you need an entirely new website, I'm happy to discuss building one: either for one sum, or priced into a subscription if that makes more sense for you. for a free consultation call.

Service Plans

$180/mo

Perfect for:
... regular announcements ...
... customer testimonials ...
... tech support ...

  • 72hr turnaround on most tasks
  • 2 hrs/mo:
    • Graphic design
    • Website changes
    • Content management
    • Email marketing
    • Social media posting
    • Code editing (e.g. PHP, JS)
    • Project management
    • Other tasks
  • And complementary:
    • Hosting
    • Site monitoring
    • Timely software updates
    • Error troubleshooting
    • Premium tools & design elements
    • Initiative & communication
    • Monthly reports & advice

$325/mo

Perfect for:
... monthly newsletters ...
... rotating products ...
... regular blogging ...

  • 72hr turnaround on most tasks
  • 4 hrs/mo:
    • Graphic design
    • Website changes
    • Content management
    • Email marketing
    • Social media posting
    • Code editing (e.g. PHP, JS)
    • Project management
    • Other tasks
  • And complementary:
    • Hosting
    • Site monitoring
    • Timely software updates
    • Error troubleshooting
    • Premium tools & design elements
    • Initiative & communication
    • Monthly reports & advice

$900/mo

Perfect for:
... busy brands ...
... e-commerce management ...
... membership communities ...

  • 24hr turnaround on most tasks
  • 12 hrs/mo:
    • Graphic design
    • Website changes
    • Content management
    • Email marketing
    • Social media posting
    • Code editing (e.g. PHP, JS)
    • Project management
    • Other tasks
  • And complementary:
    • Hosting
    • Site monitoring
    • Timely software updates
    • Error troubleshooting
    • Premium tools & design elements
    • Initiative & communication
    • Monthly reports & advice

Those are pretty good deals. Want an even better deal? You can get one month free when paying for a year upfront.

Reach out to me at to schedule a time to talk about the details, or check me out first on LinkedIn.

About Me

Photo of Homer Smith, wearing glasses, shirt, and tie.

My name is Homer Smith. I'm a husband and father living in commuting distance of Washington, D.C., where I was born. My father was a database engineer in the military, and from him I first learned coding as a child, as well as a love of philosophy and nature. Years later, I moved back to the D.C. area to volunteer and intern in urban communities until starting my own business as a web consultant, which I grew and ran for ten years. After taking a few years off (paid) work to focus on family, I reviewed my copious consulting records. Equipped with that data and a refreshed outlook, I reorganized my business. And here we are.

There's a lot of uncertainty—and oppor­tunity—on the web nowadays. I think it's fair to say we're in a new jungle, and it can be hard to set a direction when you don't know what you don't know, even for something as mundane as a website. Do you want someone with long-term web industry experience in your rolodex? and let's talk!

More Questions and Answers

Who needs a part-time webmaster?

Do you want to be doing more and communicating more online, and don't have the staff time to manage it consistently? Do you want someone you can count to handle the nuts and bolts on as technology changes? Having consistent help, and long-term professional relationships, helps your business or non-profit thrive.

I was online enough in 2000 to remember the dot-com bubble and how much changed then. If your web marketing strategy then was focused on optimizing for Excite or Lycos, for example, you'd have wasted a lot of time. Tech bubbles come and go—you don't want your organization to pop with them. You want a relationship with someone who's seen things play out before and can navigate new changes with you.

Why would I hire a webmaster when I could have AI do it instead?

It's not an either/or—it's a both/and. Let me ask you: have you ever actually tried to delegate absolutely everything to AI? You still need humans in an operation to manage the output and put it to work effectively. A well-rounded and experienced professional gives you better quality control, strategic thinking, and abductive inference.

As an aside: I suspect most services marketed under the AI umbrella are currently underpriced. Using AI in your business operations can save you money—until the companies providing those services go public and/or go under. See: Uber prices before IPO vs. after IPO, or anyone who had a library of reference books on Barnes & Noble's Nook. This is why (see above) having long-term relationships with professionals who can help you pivot is so important. It's a jungle out there on the Internet, in all the good ways and all the bad ways.

Why would I want to hire a generalist and not a specialist?

This, too, is a both/and.

If you're running (or even starting) a business or a non-profit, you're already a generalist! You already have to know enough to be able to delegate and manage effectively. And as such, you might already know what you need and who you need to hire to make it happen! A generalist with a little initiative will give you a competitive advantage by growing with you as you expand your operations. A generalist with technical literacy and solid soft skills can manage your relationships with those specialists. You can delegate a lot to a generalist.

So what web technologies do you use if you aren't delegating everything to AI?

Generally, I prefer stable, no-frills tools. I use a reliable, non-flashy web host and I aim for the perfection of having nothing left to remove, rather than nothing left to add. With that said, I do love learning new tools and technology. The future is fun.

It's not trendy, but my approach is to try to minimize disk size and bandwidth, because that's how you make a website that loads faster, costs less to run, and has a lower environmental impact, and that's important to me. Sometimes it makes sense to use Wordpress; sometimes, Drupal; sometimes, big JavaScript libraries;sometimes, cloud APIs; and, more often than you might expect, it makes sense to use static HTML—although it also makes sense to use modern tools to write it!