Who Killed the Webmaster? 334
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?"
Automation (Score:5, Insightful)
They got promoted? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The webmaster is dead. Long live the webmaster. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Killed? Probably just natural selection. (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody (Score:4, Insightful)
The entire web isn't made up of Web 2.0 community-generated content sites.
And even if you've got the latest greatest custom CMS -- someone's got to maintain it.
Newspapers and magazines still have webmasters -- those are publications with
dozens of writers, editors, photo editors and community features.
Most of the web is still (and will always be) about content, and not all content
exists on blogs and news aggregators. (Although, TFA is correct in its observation that
an increasing amount of it is). Enterprise level publishing still requires webmasters
to manage increasingly complex sites with multiple integrated systems, databases
servers, ad networks and a distributed team of editors, writers and programmers.
If you're the New York times, WebMD, iVillage, MSN, etc. a WordPress install isn't
going to replace your webmaster.
I think a better question might be: who killed the low level webmaster?
I think... (Score:4, Insightful)
People who are good at all of that are far and few between, so instead of having one mythical webmaster who does everything, it makes more sense to have the tasks split up into different jobs: Web designer, web developer and content provider (which may be any sort of professional, for example marketing or journalism, or the website user himself).
Re:The CMS (Score:3, Insightful)
Fixed.
Sadly, the average blogger/forum member is a better source of information than the manufacturer. That's not saying much, most corporate web sites are about as useful as tits on a boar. Curiously, this is one area that our beleaguered vendor Microsoft actually has right. Documenting flaws and workarounds where customers can find them.
On a personal note, I fought with a broken driver for my USB wireless adapter for an hour before breaking it open to find out who made the chipset. Did a little bit of research and got it working with the MFR's driver. In the process I also learned that the shipping driver was composed of about 30 meg of re-branding cruft built around a ~280k driver. The manufacturers website doesn't even acknowledge the device exists, and their "support" area amounts to links to the drivers that came on the CD's.
Re:Webmasters are NOT dead! (Score:0, Insightful)
Here are a few excellent points I've borrowed from a close friend of mine who works for FlashMagazine [flashmagazine.com].
- Flash is everywhere. For the web version of a game, 96% of the audience won't need to download anything except the game. More importantly, many people won't be able to install arbitrary ActiveX controls, or use a Java plugin, whereas Flash is preinstalled with Windows on corporate machines.
- Cost is essentially free - there is a small cost for the Flash IDE, but it's nearly free to distribute (just some minor licensing things to worry about that don't cost anything). Royalty-free licenses for decoders such as MP3 and Sorensen Spark are included.
- Ease of finding artists. There is a huge talent pool to draw from for creating art or animations for Flash, either on staff or contract.
- A gigantic community and secondary market. There are thousands of Flash related web sites with tutorials, articles, discussions. There are hundreds of Flash add-ons or components for sale.
- Easy copy-paste to test things out. Flash permits drag-and-drop or copy-paste from one FLA to another, and it automatically brings along any dependent objects into the new library. This can make it incredibly easy to try out quick ideas outside of the main game, and is the one case where it's worth using the debugger.
This makes it very attractive to most open source developers (my cousin being a very active member of the community).
Hope my little sermon converts a few disbelievers
Did it ever exist? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The CMS (Score:5, Insightful)
Seems to me, if you are automating yourself out of a job, reorientate so that automation IS your job.
I'm not dead, just sleeping (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure this is a typical experience.
Re:The CMS (Score:3, Insightful)
Market Forces... (Score:2, Insightful)
We use something called "supply and demand" to determine prices and such, not just on consumer goods but on jobs and salaries also. Some jobs are just low pay or go away, 95% of the time this is better for society (though it may really suck for an individual).
Like it or not, a "webmaster" never was one of the really tough jobs that took a lot of talent and ability. Yes, there were - and definitely still are - sites that require such, but the title of "webmaster" includes a lot less. When a current high school student can do the job, chances are that 50,000+ a year isn't going to last once the market figure it out. It never should have been that high to begin with.
The real talent isn't called a webmaster anymore, they have moved into the software development team. What used to be a "webmaster" job is now just a sideline of one of the developer's job. Such is the way of creating a job that doesn't require much knowledge, skill, or time outside of one of the jobs that does - it goes away (especially when said job applicants demand a salary on par with those that not only do their job but much more).
We do not live in the late 90's where no one knows what "the web" is or what it is capable of. We can longer demand really strange things - welcome to the real world (by now, most of us have figured it out, haven't seen on of these "questions" in quite a long time). Once business figures out anyone and their brother/sister can do the job it's salary drops to nothing or is rolled into another. To expect otherwise is silly - how many complaining would pay someone what they are wanting for those services?
Evolution. Nothing more. (Score:4, Insightful)
Two things...
First, the task formerly called "webmaster" really didn't involve all that much real "skill" - During the dotcom boom it paid well, but damn sure shouldn't have. In general, you had two types of people doing the job - Real coders tasked with keeping the company website updated in their "spare" time, and wannabe coders who could handle HTML but not much else. Sorry, that sounds harsh, but it does set the stage.
Enter easy-to-use WYSIWIG page editing tools, AJAX, Buzzword 2.0, and what-have you. These changes, over time, have radically segregated the web into two distinct subgroups: We have the coders I previously put in group #1 now spending a much more significant chunk of their time maintaining fairly complex systems, but still not enough to dedicate a full-time engineer to for anything except a few megasites (and on them, they have whole teams of people working on something much more similar to a real software project than to the traditional "web site"); group #2 has no role in that, and has taken to blogging, vanishing into the masses as everyone and their brother pretends the world wants to hear about their breakfast and latest messy romance.
So what happened to the "webmaster" of old? Simple - the job outgrew most of its practitioners, but still hasn't made it far enough (with a few exceptions, of course) that real engineers would give it first billing on their resumes.
Re:They got promoted? (Score:3, Insightful)
The short explanation is that, after the dot.com bubble, companies have gone with the "many hats/renaissance man" approach of the early 90s as opposed to the super-specialized approach of the bubble.
Re:Webmasters are NOT dead! (Score:5, Insightful)
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!"
Re:Colonel Mustard (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The CMS (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The webmaster killed himself (Score:1, Insightful)
Then came the day when the scripts became too cumbersome and I threw it all into ASP. When I told the boss man I needed a server upgrade to run the junk, he threw a tizzy and out-sourced my job to a consultancy firm to "save money".
Well, that's the long and short of it. The consultancy firm do a better job than I ever could - alone, but the boss man don't save much money. Still, he's happy. He gets weekly statistics and reports on click-throughs and downloads. He doesn't know any better. And me, I'm a Network Engineer now. Better pay, but I do miss the free pop.
Your call is very important to us (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:No, it was me. (Score:4, Insightful)
In a gold rush, the way to make money is to sell shovels!
Re:No, it was me. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:You're kidding, right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Ha, you've never worked in the music business then!
Re:Webmasters are NOT dead! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep.
Flash, when used sparingly, can be useful. It totally sucks however when a company does their entire site as flash. In many (most) cases you can't print, and the site is slow to navigate. I really don't want to sit through some loud 5 minute AV presentation every time I go a site's home page, looking for specific information.
Re:I'm here (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:The CMS (Score:2, Insightful)
Give an liberal arts major a job other than selling you a cup of coffee.
Re:The webmaster is alive and well (Score:3, Insightful)