Slashdot Mirror
Who Killed the Webmaster?
XorNand writes "With the explosive growth of the Web in the previous decade, many predicted the birth of a new, well-paying, and in-demand profession: the Webmaster. Yet in 2007, this person has somehow vanished; even the term is scarcely mentioned. What happened? A decade later I'm left wondering: Who killed the Webmaster?"
You're right... because it was I who killed the Webmaster!
(Posting anonymously, on the grounds that the contents of this post might tend to incriminate me...)
That might be true, but to get modded up on this site you're going to need a Simpsons reference.
Web developer to me means a programmer/coder kind of position that's usually seperate from page design except at very small sites--the person writing ASP/PHP/ColdFusion/Ruby on Rails/JSP/etc is a web developer, the person deciding that the page should look like this, with nav bars over here, and these fonts and colors is the page designer.
In fact, the following are all different tasks (and I doubt the list is exhaustive by any stretch), though several may be done by one person at a particular site:
Authors (content)
Designers (layout)
Usabilty/HCI developers
Markup (Turning design into HTML code)
Web developer (writing code that dynamically generates HTML)
System developer (writing business logic components/back-end objects)
Database developer/DBA
Systems administrator
There are often ancillary tasks too (tester, publisher, etc) and there are other important tasks that people don't tend to conflate with those so I didn't list them (e.g. project manager, sales, etc).
For a small site there might be just one person doing the whole list, or everything but content and possibly design. In my experience, though, the most common places to seperate tasks if you have just 2 people working on the site are either right above the web designer on the list, or in many cases just the content is one person.
Where I work the line items are mostly seperate except that design, usability, and markup are done by the same people (and they'll often get involved with content), the senior system developers are also the DBAs, and there's a fair amount of overlap between some of the system developers and web developers (some work is strictly segregated between the two, some is more tightly bound).
Of course, lines often get blurred.
rage, rage against the dying of the light
This seems like a good opportunity to recruit more webmasters for the GNU Project.
:)
If you know your GNU from your Linux, and you fancy the chance to work on a very popular website, www.gnu.org, then please drop me an email...
mattl at gnu dot org - put 'slashdot webmastering' in the subject please
Join the Free Software Foundation
Having said that, there are plenty of "webmasters" out there, with a broad range of web-related skills that defy easy categorization. If you read forums like Web Hosting Talk, Digital Point or SitePoint, you'll see lots of participants that that fit the general a description.
RichM
Data Center Knowledge
ORIENTATE IS NOT A WORD!!!!!
Perhaps you'd like to check before shouting next time: Orientate
She needs to go to the Commander Montgomery Scott School of Sandbagging.
"Laddie-- you dinna tell him how long it would really take? You'll never get a reputation as a miracle worker that way!"Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
That's an excellent synopsis but you're forgetting the non profit site. True, only a few people care about the content but they are often passionate about it, wanting current information about their organization. Forget that the sites for all volunteer organizations look 10 years old and ugly. Non profits are one of the few places where the webmaster is alive and well, though not remunerated.