The question on the table is: Should every job seeker in Communication have a web page? My answer is a qualified yes.
The great Jewish rabbis always taught that a scholar must learn a trade to support himself. It was not enough to know the intricacies of Talmudic reasoning or the fanciful heights of the Kabbalah. One must know how to make something immediately useful in the world. Even after his excommunication by the Jewish community of Amsterdam, Spinoza was able to support himself as a lensgrinder.
One advantage a Ph.D. in Communication should provide to job-seekers is an ability to teach communication skills -- whether in public speaking, small group decisionmaking, or video production. Given the uncertain future of universities as the capitalist market now invades every part of the lifeworld, Communication Ph.D.'s may be able to hedge their career bets better than those in other disciplines. Adding computer-mediated communication skills to one's repertoire is an excellent idea.
But there also are pedagogical and scholarly reasons to have a home page. What the Internet has done -- or will do -- is force the academy to rethink the nature of literacy. The English department built its now tottering empire on the basic composition course, and then (except for the proud and few composition scholars) forgot what it was there for.
Despite our recurring disciplinary anxiety, us folks in Communication know that what we teach has value to the corporate masters now scrutinizing the university's bottom line. We should be taking the lead in the process of rethinking literacy for the next millennium: how to use the new technologies to integrate the arts of speaking, writing, argument, graphic design, audio, video, and--eventually, when touch is digitized--sculpture. The "available means of persuasion" have expanded dramatically. We need to know how to use them. We need to be able to teach students to use them. If I were a Dean or department head at a small college or university, I would want to know how a job candidate can help bring the field into the next century. The ability to design a good website is an outward and visible sign of an inward set of talents and motivations.
On the other hand, if you are looking for a good first job at a Research I institution, it is far more important that you have your first two book projects mapped out than that you know HTML. At the age of 45 I have seen fads come and go in this field. First there was interpersonal communication, which was going to replace the basic course in public speaking. Then came organizational communication. Then came public relations. Then came cultural studies. Now comes computer-mediated communication. Some of these developments were fads. Some have emerged as major contributions to knowledge. It is too early to tell with CMC.
Yet some things have remained the same. There are jobs aplenty for those who know statistics and experimental design. Part of the problem with humanities researchers in the field has been that they often do not have the basic tools of scholarship. My former Dean at St. Olaf always asked prospective job candidates at the College what languages they spoke. Inevitably, Communication candidates could only answer "English." Too many articles in our journals are rearrangements of secondary works, and do not reflect the hard work of slogging through archival material to discover something genuinely new to say about the rhetorical past. Or, worse, they avoid the library entirely and pretend that *moi* criticism is somehow scholarship.
So, by all means learn the tools for making a home page, but if it comes down to a choice between computer skills and learning a foreign language, time series analysis, or making a trip to the archives, by all means choose the latter group of skills, if you are in this game for good.