Has the job title "Webmaster" Changed in meaning?
Monday January 28, 2008
When I first started working in the Internet industry, it seemed like Webmaster was going to become the ubiquitous term for someone who managed Web servers. I got a job as a Webmaster and answered webmaster@netcom.com email (along with other duties...). In my company, the Webmaster was responsible for building and maintaining Web pages, answering mail, and knowing a little about the Web server. At the time I would get email from Netcom customers who were putting up personal Web pages with our templating system, and they would start "From one Webmaster to another..." This was interesting to me, as I felt that what I needed to know how to do to do my job required a lot more knowledge than how to manipulate a template tool. In other words, while I felt that I was a Webmaster, I wasn't so sure that those customers were. So, in 1998, I asked the question "What is a Webmaster?" and answered it based on my own experience. Ten years later, has the job changed? Or just my thoughts about it? What do you think? The following article discusses what some About.com readers think a Webmaster is and how the job description has changed in 10 years.
Comments
I still think of a webmaster as someone that maintains the servers. I guess it may depend on the size of the company. If it was a small company and you had one person responsible for the “web work” like doing the pages, you might refer to them as the webmaster. I’m still stuck in the past I guess!
I see a webmaster as being the person that actually owns the site and maintains it. That’s all. I’ve never had any reason to think I was wrong in this assumption.
Tim: I don’t think this is a matter of being right or wrong. Perceptions change (or they don’t). It’s not like there’s a definition of “Webmaster” written in stone somewhere.
I just meant no one has ever disagreed with me. To make me wonder if I’m perhaps wrong.
It’s an interesting question and I put it forward to my team who said the same thing I did.
It appears to me that the Webmaster title is as flexible as any other title. A CEO for a one employee company has just as much authority as a CEO for a large corporation, but their day-to-day tasks and reponsibilities can vary widely.
I thought it meant someone with a wide range of skills apart from HTML/CSS; things such as PHP, SQL, Javascript etc and server-side stuff.
The Dictionary.com definition - A person whose occupation is designing, developing, marketing, or maintaining websites.
I don’t know if its a UK thing but most people I know think that a webmaster is a person who owns a small site and creates content for it. They’d typically have no skills beyond basic HTML & CSS.
I was really surprised to hear that it would ever be part of an actual professional job title!