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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?"
Next question.
Colonel Mustard with Web 2.0 in the kitchen.
Same thing that killed the guy who used to drive around bringing ice so your grandparents could keep the food in their icebox cold.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
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.
Start a happiness pandemic
Saying "Content is King" in the same sentence as Myspace et. al. is like saying an overflowing ashtray is a sign of productivity.
If there were so many webmasters back then, in the world of "flaming skulls, scrolling marquees, and rainbow divider lines", as the article states it, perhaps the world has just come to its senses and the clueless "webmasters" have died off, leaving the sites to competent programmers and designers.
This time last year my wife and I were eating in our favourite restaurant and got chatting to the couple on the table next to ours. Sooner or later the subject of work came up. I said I was a web developer. "we are web developers too" they said. It turns out they work from home just down the road from us. He does the backend asp coding and she does the front end and photography. They still churn their way through local SME businesses that want a 4 page brochure website. The thing is they make a good living out of it. Just as much as I can make in a large but specialised web development company.
Yes "webmasters" are rare but they are not extinct.
another Roadkill on the Information Superhighway
...but I didn't kill the deputy [webmaster]
The revolution will not be televised... but it will have a page on Wikipedia
I did a rather quick search on monster.com (results: http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?q=webmast er&fn=&lid=&re=130&cy=us&JSNONREG=1 ), and as of 1/29/2007 2:30 (GMT-6), there are 189 listings for "webmaster"
2 0star&fn=&lid=&re=0&cy=us&JSNONREG=1&pg=1 ) , and as of 1/29/2007 2:30 (GMT-6), there are 24 listings for "radio star", thus proving that Video didn't kill the radio star.
0 picker&fn=&lid=&re=0&cy=us&JSNONREG=1&pg=1 )
I also did a quick search on moster.com (results: http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?q=radio%
Of course, you can take these results for what they are worth. After all, I got 371 results when I searched for "nose picker" on monster.com ( http://jobsearch.monster.com/Search.aspx?q=nose%2
Navicula hydraulica plena anguilarum est. Omnes castelli tuus nostri sunt. Ed elli avea del cul fatto trombetta.
Your previous generation of self-appointed "webmasters" were the first folks on the scene. This was before most people even knew what a hyperlink was, let alone HTML. Therefore, being able to hack together a page that would render properly was a rare ability. It was a new form of media, with its own rules, and it was trying to borrow aesthetically from print media. So you had a bunch of "pages" that, honestly, looked like crap (partly because the people with skills were focusing more on functionality than form, and partly because nobody knew what a good "web page" was supposed to look like).
Gradually, programmers started making better tools so that less technically-inclined people could jump in and try things. Some of these folks were artists, and some rather beautiful and elegant layouts were developed. At about the same time, tools started popping up that allowed people to type content into a text box and have it appear with the proper formatting applied, or have the data be automatically imported and formatted from a database. With this, the amount of content on the web increased dramatically. A webmaster's focus was on editing and uploading individual HTML files (a comparatively laborious task compared to entering something into a blog post form), and at the same time he had to compete directly with the better designs and layouts from the art pool.
So what happened? The more technically oriented webmasters became LAMP specialists or coders (and the bottom of the barrel started making IE-only pages). The more artistically inclined ones discovered CSS and Dreamweaver and went on to contribute to a prettier and easier to use web. A very small minority with talents in both areas got fantastic jobs and made lots of money making tools for artists or better interfaces (dynamic HTML, slide-out widgets, WYSIWYG in forms). And the rest? Well, you don't get very far if you can't adapt.
I wanted a website too complex for a single person.
Some kind of self-defeating dating site then?
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Same thing that killed the guy who used to drive around bringing ice so your grandparents could keep the food in their icebox cold.
Syphilis?
Push Button, Receive Bacon
Some say specialization killed the Webmaster. I say common knowledge killed him. It just isn't cool to be a Webmaster anymore, pretty much anyone can do the job or knows a kid who can do the job.
And while I agree that some people have chosen to specialize even more, I've seen people go in the other direction as well. There are still Jacks-of-All-Trades, except those new Jacks may know a scripting language or two, a bit of database, a bit of graphic design, a bit of apache, etc. And those new Jacks-of-all-Trades just couldn't market themselves under the old label Webmaster, since that label doesn't really describe what they do now, nor does that old label describe something that's very special anymore.
> ... it wasn't me.
No, I was there, and... it was me.
Well, there were a few of us involved. But my personal confession reads as follows:
I wrote scripts that let end users change their own pages. I integrated Wysiwyg editors into CMS systems. I coded some wiki-markup processors. I made design changes friendly for non-techies. I wrote image thumbnailers, and CSS-generators that used customer preferences.
I didn't know it was wrong! I was just following orders! Everyone was doing it! Lots of others killed him more than I did!
*Moves to Brazil*
Actually, it was Colonel Mustard in the study with the candlestick. :-)
Start a happiness pandemic
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
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!"
I agree... the "Webmaster" role is still around, only the people playing the role are different. The old webmaster role was the geeky dude who you went to when you wanted to establish a "presence" on the web. We paid them to crank out crappy-looking pages with flaming GIFs, whacked backgrounds, and nothing to say.
While the focus in 1999 was "getting in the game," the focus today is content and market awareness. As a result, we've moved web publishing from the IT department to the communications and marketing departments. The IT department builds the framework and they MBA-types type in the marketing babble.
Given the ongoing disconnect between IT and business, I think it's a pretty logically evolution. Why would I let someone with no people skills greet my customers?
Who killed the webmaster, what an interesting question.
.. they were never too clear on the title, and I had business cards for both at one point.
.. and started asking for help with the websites for the local markets. Then they asked about help with the servers, setting up software, database design, etc etc etc. And I was migrated into the roll.
.. and we gave away like a dozen trips to Hawaii.
:P [Not their fault, advertising / marketing people are not code folks .. what did I expect ?]
.. I left .. Now i run a tech department at a start up doing some interesting stuff and the future looks to be interesting, lucrative with some luck.
:
.. a cake walk. Those people go t bored. Most left.
My last job, at a fortune 500 power tool manufacturing company, my title was actually 'Webmaster' and I hated it. I took the job in 2000, Coming from another large company, the one that 90% of you use for your cable modem in the U.S. There I was a 'Web Designer', or sometimes a 'Web Developer'
In 1998, when I took the job at the 'Cable Company', they were just rolling out their Cable Modems, and looking for sales-men. Having spent the last five years local, and over the pond, selling metal toy soldiers, paint, and full colour hobby magazines to kids [or to reluctant store owners, who didn't understand that kids spend a lot of money on my former company's products.] I sent a resume in. I was hired. Quickly. And spent 6 months in the number one,two, or three spot on their sales floor.
Someone, somewhere found out that I actually had a degree in Computer Science
Lots and lots of work in a brand new 'field', learning something new every day.
Skip forward to 2000, and I changed companies for a 50% pay increase. I figured any company willing to almost double my salary HAD to have a challenging environment. Woah boy was I wrong. Most of the other 'web masters' there knew html. maybe a little javascript out of a book. NONE of them had any experience in programming. My job quickly turned into churning out HTML filled spam-email, and endlessly updating the look-and-feel of a few corporate websites to keep up with marketing driven initiatives.
I did get to write a cool football pick program for a well known cystic fibrosis charity the last year there though
I spent FIVE years there, trying to make my job a better one. But that great salary was becoming less so, as I had few raises. I was moved from my original department that had a bonus scheme - to another that didn't. [like a 10-15k a year pay cut on good years] I worked for a number of bosses who had NO idea what I could actually do, and when I tried to explain to them - couldn't understand what they didn't understand
It got so I was embarrassed to mention my title to anyone in the company. I was doing NO real work, just busywork, and watching folks who went to other companies that I doing all the cool stuff, for the same or more money. I had chosen poorly.
So
So what killed the webmaster ? I think it was a little bit of a lot of things
Many early webmasters were code heads who learned html early on, and went with it. Hacking away at a new idea was like breathing to those guys. These guys became in high demand, as there were very few full time coders who wanted to give that up for 'html' crap, but people did give it up, when the salaries surpassed what they were making. With clear second site, it seemed such easy work for good money
The other kind of early webmaster was the person who saw html code, and dremweaver or (shudder) frontpage, and set up shop as a webmaster, with no coding experience - and PROUD of the fact that they were self taught. They could do layout, many had a good eye for design, and carved a niche and hung on to it desperately in the early 2ks. There were LOTS of these guys.
Throw on top of that the cha
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