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?"

Comments

Re:became specialized

[pthisis]

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.