Web Master

One very confusing term in web professions is the term “Web Master” - aka, Webmaster -. The whole solution of this confusion is to be sure that the definition will differ from a person to another, from the normal user point of view or from the enterprise one, each define this term considering how does he benefit from such profession.

I have been reading and trying to find an optimal definition for such term and here is what I found:

Wikipedia defines web master saying:

The webmaster (feminine: webmistress), also called the web architect, the web developer, the site author, or the website administrator, is the person responsible for designing, developing, marketing, or maintaining a website.

This really makes confusion more here, because in such definition wikipedia has included more terms in here, to refer to the real role of webmaster. Although, I was convinced with the Web Architect, but when I visited the link I found it referring to Web Design, so I visited that link and I knew why it said “Web Design”. Wikipedia defines web design as the process of “Planning”, “Modeling” and “Execution” of a web site, but using markup languages and considering GUI. This is the common definition we know, but they just put in consideration that web designer has to know how stuff may work also, just to take in consideration the users who might use the web site, or the clients -applications- that might access it.

Web design is a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic mediacontent delivery via Internet in the form of technologies (such as markup languages) suitable for interpretation and display by a web browser or other web-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

Anyway, this is not our subject here . Back to Wikipedia’s definition, when we find the term “Web Developer”, and this one is really simple and clear in definition; a Web Developer is someone who is concerned with deploying web application, even if this application will be published on the Internet or on a network to provide a service to the network users. We can add, web server administration and maintenance, database administration with some skills in database design, web design, web content management systems - which has become VERY important in the last few years - and many other fields. Sure, we have to add the knowledge in markup (HTML) and scripting languages (PHP, JavaScript..etc.).

About.com had a very good article about Webmastering, which stated some of webmaster’s tasks in a working environment as follows:

• Maintenance: almost 20%, this is the period which starts just after the website is released. It continues as long as the production company/individual releases the website to the internet.
• Programming: 30-50%, this means doing actual code, and this is really different from development which takes another kind of tasks at all.
• Development: The author of the article stated that this is the most enjoyable part in the duties of his job. It’s the planning part, before they start the actual coding of the website.
• Server Maintenance: He said that this task was assigned to the Web Engineer in his team, but he also stated that there were times when he had to fill this place, so by nature he had to know about servers’ maintenance.
• Release Process: This is the process of releasing the website and the being transferred from the development environment to the actual working one.

This is for now, hope you like it