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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?"
I don't think the job is gone, but perhaps the title is. "Webmaster" has been rolled into other jobs, because management of a public-facing web site is increasingly just one facade of a far more important job, management of a company's entire systems, which falls generally to the CIO, and then gets delegated from there down to a particular person or group.
I can think of a lot of web sites where 90+% of the content isn't part of the "site" per se, but part of databases that are somehow interfaced into the site (CRM systems, accounting, etc.). The "webmaster"'s job can be a lot more like a circus ringleader, trying to keep everyone happy and plugged in.
In line with the increasing managerial responsibilities, the title of "webmaster" may have disappeared into various "Information Systems" titles. The job is still there, somewhere, but it's called something different.
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The answer is simple. What killed the webmaster? Specialization!
The old time "webmaster" was a jack of all trades, doing design, HTML, managing your hosting account, submitting your site to search engines, and coding or subcontracting interactive scripts.
But the web and the number of ways to create content and interactivity have expanded faster than any person's skillset can. Furthermore, people started seeing really slick, professional sites, and the "Geocities Home Page On Steroids" junk that a lot of webmasters were churning our just wasn't acceptable anymore.
There are still "webmasters" where the web operation for a company or organization is kept in-house and limited to a single person. But when you get into concepts like economy of scale... if you don't need a full-time person (i.e. your site doesn't need that much active management), it's just cheaper to contract it out. And in most cases, the big, slick operations are getting those contracts.
For the big slicks, it doesn't make sense to have a bunch of jacks of all trades, mastering none, doing merely acceptable jobs. It's better to have a team of specialists and parcel out different parts to the people who excel in those parts. You get slicker, better product, faster turnaround, and the employees are plug-and-play making a single point of failure less likely.
As web sites needed to have more and varied pieces, demanded more expertise in more areas, the "webmaster" started to be replaced by the Graphic Designer, the Web Dev, the Server Jockey, the DBA, the SEO person, etc. It's sort of like math or science. A long, long time ago, it was possible for a single person to obtain the sum total of human knowledge in these disciplines. Now, you can't. You have to pick a specialty. People entering the world of web site construction and maintenance are finding that they have to pick a speciality too.
There are webmasters out there, but they're being killed off by an environment that is growing ever more complex.
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So, in other words, it's incredibly convenient for the content creator, user-be-damned.
Yes, yes, you said that Flash is ubiquitous, meaning it's not a hassle for the user to install. But who cares. I'm using a web browser, and it recognizes HTML and displays images without any additional installation on the part of the user, so Flash is no easier on the user than just plain HTML.
The problem is that Flash generally contributes to web cruft, making it harder for the user to get what he wants: information. Now, this isn't necessarily Flash's fault. It's just a tool, like a gun or a Robot 1-X. But people use it wrong, and that's why people like me go to extra efforts to avoid it.
Flash is really good for two things: (1) interactive content and (2) well-synchronized animation and sound requiring low bandwidth. That's great. In particular situations, I'll fire up my old IE (which still has Flash capabilities on my machine) to view a particular Flash crapplet that has a funny animation or an interesting interactive interface (like a web-based game). But 90% of the Flash out there is used for (3) site navigation. For the love of init, why?! This is, literally, what HTML was born for, yet webbastards continue churning out sites where there's only one URL, and the rest of the site is locked up in some colossal Flash crapplet that doesn't present any more information than a regular HTML design could provide, but has tons more fancy animations. It's like the blink tag for the third millennium.
I realize your friend is probably a die-hard Flash fanatic, but I hope you'll share with him a line borrowed from another industry whose product is often abused: "Please, Flash responsibly!"
Not really. You have four sorts of websites.
You have the amateur sites, which probably are done by one person, don't involve making money (in any serious way). Some of these involve a CMS, some don't, and frankly no-one cares.
You have the small-business sites, which exist to advertise a product and maybe sell it. Generally the small business doesn't employ anyone with the skills to make a good looking et cetera website, certainly it doesn't have the cash to have a full time webmaster who would most of the time sit on his arse anyway. So they pay a web design firm for a website and for the occasional update. Maybe there is a CMS system put in by the design firm so the small business's owner can change a few words himself, but that's about as far as it goes. Maybe these companies could do more with the internet than they do, but they don't have the money.
You have the big business sites which do all kinds of things over the internet, and those guys don't have 'a webmaster' because there is far too much for one guy to do, instead they have the web section of the IT department, with several full time guys all doing bits of the company website (and intranet site).
And somewhere in a tiny niche market you have a few companies which have decided they need to employ a full time webmaster specifically to run their website, they're big enough and internet-dependent enough to need it, but then they've stopped there. That means they need a guy who is making changes all the time, 40 hours a week, so there is likely to be a fair bit of ASP or PHP or whatever, some database stuff, but somehow the CEO and PR guys have decided that the current flashy stuff is enough and they don't need any more stuff that would require another website guy to be hired.
Your partially right. You don't need a webmaster to edit CONTENT on a web site. Editing layout templates and scripts however isn't quite so simple - especially if you want it to look halfway decent on multiple different browsers (or even work at all if you are doing AJAX.)
But to address the main topic, the simple answer is that web isn't nearly as simple as it used to be. Now you don't just have a webmaster, you have a team... You have graphic designers, usability experts, programmers, system administrators, DBA's, domain (knowledge) experts, etc., and of course "content editors." Now that doesn't mean that Joe can't just download / install Drupal or some other CMS and implement it, but if Joe really wants to customize Drupal to work with his custom databases and brand it with his own look and feel, he needs a wide variety of skills. That's why there are companies that will customize Drupal for you.