How Many Sites Are Run By Single Webmasters?

[RedBar]

Rndm posted:

Honestly the idea of a webmaster seems like a very outdated concept. I have worked for a few agencies and through them a LOT of companies. You will not find anything like a webmaster at at these companies in the way that it is described here. I would think that there are very very few sites that are ran by a single webmaster.I have always been confused by the use of the term on this site. I may be way off course so feedback is appreciated.

I am not against the association idea btw, but perhaps cast a wider net than webmaster to get a larger audience. Perhaps it is an SEO body of some sort. If you go the publisher route it would probably attract more content marketers than I think is wanted. Just some rambling thoughts.

I'm going to stick my neck out and say I think you would be surprised how many sites are run by one/two webmasters.

I'm not referring to huge multi page ecommerce sites, I'm referring to the vast majority of company brochure and small ecommerce sites.

I know of several USD 1+ billion company sites run "conventionally" by a couple of people and are top of their rankings.

Am I right or totally off the mark.

BTW Rndm, I think you may also be surprised at the average age here:-)

[not2easy]

I am pretty sure I am not the only person here who is running my own sites. When I started, there were not so many services being offered to 'build to suit'. Picking up information and how-to from places like WebmasterWorld has taken me through the past two decades online. I don't think my 'solo' business model is rare or unique.

I don't understand the 'outdated concept' thing, it is not a static thing. Learning is never outdated, evolution continues.

[Kendo]

Today's site owners don't need to know much when WordPress is offered already installed. Even "website developers" don't need skills... so many now using WordPress.

In contrast, I managed a rural ISP and server farm from a second bedroom 2001-2009 and today manage a dedicated Windows server and a virtual server using Linux which are hosted in USA. Coding in PHP and Classic ASP has been a necessity as was developing CMS in both OS and SAAS on Windows.

Today I single-handed manage about 30 websites, 4-6 plugins for each of the CMS like WordPress, DNN, Drupal, Joomla and Moodle, 4 desktop software applications, 3 server software applications and a custom web browser.

I am old enough to be a great grandfather, but never bored.

[iamlost]

I’m also running my own sites; have for past two decades.

Many/most successful sole webdevs stopped participating in public fora or similar a decade ago as signal got lost in noise. A few of us are simply creatures of habit; rocking on the porch to memories, still paying forward.

[lucy24]

Fer hevvins sake. Isn’t that like saying the concept of “Boss” is archaic because most businesses have more than one person in a management position? No matter how many developers you have, there had darn well better be someone who is responsible for dealing with typo reports and dead links.

I am pretty sure I am not the only person here who is running my own sites.

Yup.

[Wilburforce]

Today's site owners don't need to know much when WordPress is offered already installed.

I'd probably put "Don't use Wordpress" fairly high on the list of Things They Need to Know.

However, Wordpress only deals with design and function. What webmasters need to know about -most is content.

As for as the original question, I've been a single webmaste - along with many of my small-business-owner friends - since the 1990s. I will retire eventually, but until I do it will stay that way.

[Marshall]

I have 3 webmasters: Me, Myself and I, and have been that way since the late 90's. The key is to not over extend yourself either with too many projects at once or projects that are too large. I rather have a dozen or two reliable small to medium clients than one huge one that my life depends on. They go down, so do you.

[OldFaces]

I really dig this thread. I was just talking to a few folks last week about wanting to reclaim the title 'webmaster'. I know it's gone almost extinct but I think the term should be resurrected. I am the primary in a small team that runs a rather large community website that has been online for 20 years. My roles include some minor dev (we have two engineers because I don't have the time anymore), polishing or refinement of the product (the community website), analytics crunching - not just the usual user metrics but also event fires to make informed decisions on product direction, billing (advertisers & affiliates), general sys/dev ops although we have part time help for the actual physical steps of upgrading SQL, monitoring and revising AWS services, and etc. We have someone on our team who works full time monitoring UGC, responding to member requests and etc.

I call those responsibilities among many others the role of a modern day webmaster. I think folks on wordpress etc are also webmasters. If they grow they'll quickly outgrow CMS systems like wordpress and will either have to learn how to code, learn basic dev ops, db management and etc.

[MrSavage]

Webmasters died with the Panda era, and with each subsequent "update", the concept of "webmaster" becomes closer to extinction. Most webmasters were happy with modest earning and a somewhat achievable goal of getting enough traffic (organic) to make content creation and site maintenance worthwhile. Panda was around the time Google said enough sharing. Enough with the generosity. So to me, the blood is on Google's hands when it comes to extinction of the "webmaster". When Adsense mattered, the webmaster largely mattered. There is a direct correlation between the two because the revenue stream made being a webmaster possible. Google needed the sites to show the ads. Now they keep most on their own properties. Nice when you monopolize the web as they do. Now it's corporate churn and burn. Sweat shops of content creation. Aside from that, the web is rather splendid these days.

[Kendo]

quickly outgrow CMS systems like wordpress

Probably not because there is too much to learn and by then there will be even more to learn. With a ready made CMS the site owner can concentrate on content. If any new features are needed there will be 100s of plugins to choose from. It wasn't long ago that CMS wasn't as good for SEO. Then SEO plugins appeared and now those features are included as standard... in all CMS except Moodle for which I had to write a custom plugin just to add a description meta-tag populated from the first few lines of the text body.

Most of us started writing our own CMS because there wasn't much to choose from back in the day. Because I run SAAS and am dependent on Windows servers, CMS options were very limited or insecure/exploitable. I had no choice but to write my own.

[tangor]

The change happening in web publishing is about the same as when word processors appeared and typewriter's (and secretary/typists) were replaced with (eventually) cut and paste, drag and drop, and all that happy stuff.

All of a sudden everyone was a publisher overnight ... and the local and vanity press houses all across the world were nudged into unprofitability dang near overnight. Advent of POD (the print industry version of the WordPress impact) simply nailed the coffin shut.

HOWEVER, even in print, with all the gizmos and gadgets of the last 40 years, there resides a top level, a place where actual skill, knowledge, and creativity is still required. The solitary folks still doing web pages fall into that category and many of us are that...

ON THE OTHER HAND, the PC culture worldwide strongly suggests that webMASTER is no longer a desired term ... Years back I ceased using "webmaster" and refer to myself as a WEBSLINGER, Have Keyboard, Will Travel.

YMMV

[RedBar]

Now it's corporate churn and burn. Sweat shops of content creation.

Whilst I totally comprehend this point of view surely this applies to specific companies / niches and types of sites?

Quality, well-written, informative company sites and blogs still require a good person(s) to create interesting, knowledgable and valuable content?

This will be our 27th year online and still no company in my global industry has what one would call an ecommerce site. Definitely there are tens of thousands of sites all promoting their products and capabilities however the nature of the business is simply not as simple as 2 x widgets @ USD 19.99 each.

High quality images and copywriting are a must, after all much of my industry is dealing with highly-educated and very skilled people with massive public responsibilites should anything go wrong!

There are thousands / millions of drag and drop ecommerce sites in existence but what is the proportion of these v corporate brochure v blogs v informational sites?

[MrSavage]

Most of the sites that I visit or find in Google have one thing in common. Churning out content to the extent that no one person could keep up with. A single webmaster can create how much on a daily or weekly basis? Sites that rank, almost exclusively can churn out many many articles a day and when they do that, they can get ranking on pretty much any topic they tackle. There are always exceptions to the rule of course, but since we're talking about the demise of the "webmaster", then we should consider those most affected. The lack of spirit and posts on this very site should be telling enough to know the story. It's pretty clear that sites (most) require content creation sweat shops. I suppose there is still a need for stale, one post per week or less sites but just hope that churn and burn sites don't start hitting on some of those subjects because niche/expertise sites run by a singular webmaster are dead to Google. If this wasn't the majority then you would be seeing these forums thriving, which they most certainly are not.

[RedBar]

Do well-established, experienced webmasters need to frequent forum boards? I don't think so, in all the time I've posted here since 2004, I think I can honestly say I've only learnt a couple of small things and that was about 15 years ago.

I enjoy the chat and posts plus helping others if they're making big mistakes and I also know quite a few webmasters who have zero interest whatsoever in partaking in forum boards and they are some of the really top guys.

Granted plug and play and drag and drop have taken away some of the fun yet my pages will out-perform any of those over-bloated code hogs any day:-)

[nomis5]

A few of us are simply creatures of habit; rocking on the porch to memories, still paying forward.

A gem of a sentence, love it!

I'm a one man band and have been for well over a decade. Still earning a decent amount of money, enough to live off.

I know my subject matter inside out and it has paid off. Still learning and still updating my website after 20 years.

My subject matter is all manner of gardening and the content provided by "turn and churn" sites and their companions the "publish a million pages a day" is ever, ever so quickly uncovered as trite and rubbish by my particular audience.

Gardening is a boring subject to many but luckily for me it is the most popular hobby in the UK. Shallow articles about this subject are simply ignored by those who know, and those who know are the ones who buy.

My presentation on my website is well below par, the content though, is the best. That's how to exist as a one man / woman webmaster.

[iamlost]

While this thread is in the ‘Google’ SEO forum once one invokes ‘webmaster’ one relegates Google to secondary or tertiary importance; both for traffic and for revenue.

Those that can’t or won’t can still, obviously, be a success but are Googlemasters not webmasters.

That nitpick aside the real difference is not in
(1) what the webdev uses but in their understanding; are they just commodity drivers or can they get under the hood and build in competitive advantage differences? Do they use tools for purpose or do tools impose limitations? leverage or restraint?

(2) how the webdev markets, whether standing at trough waiting for feeding or actively going wherever their niche audience to provide benefit to gather links, testimonials aka WoM and return traffic?

(3) how the webdev sells, whether commodity or own product, direct or third party ads/af, etc. As with (2): active hunting or passive feedlot?

There is a lot to master doing business on the web and it is especially daunting for a sole entrepreneur or small business, time is an unforgiving constraint. Indeed, the more one masters the more there appears to be mastered.

[NickMNS]

What Iamlost says makes a lot of sense, but [more specifically with respect to point 2 and 3] I don't think that most of the skills described fall under the traditional skill set of a "webmaster". Those skills better describe the skills of an entrepreneur or small business person.

This is really difference from the past, a webmaster's today needs to know more than just the webdev / computer science skills, one also needs to be entrepreneurial.

[Wilburforce]

one also needs to be entrepreneurial

What about reference, informational and academic interest sites?

[tangor]

Those all fall into the aspects already noted:

Information is information, regardless of category.

Can a single person do it? Yes. Will they be successful? Only if they are more than just a coder ... which in the old days was often called a "webmaster".

[fearlessrick]

I've been a webmaster since 1999, solo all the way and pushed the change from "web site" to "website" back in the day. I take personal responsibility for cranking down the language ;-) I used the single word term from day 1, and was thrilled when I saw professionals adopt it.

Anyhow, 21 years later, still on my own, going broke slowly, with the one website I started with and a few others plus a daily blog and another daily baseball blog in season (yesterday was the first day of Spring Training games. Yay!).

As a former newspaper publisher with as many as seven publications and a staff of 16, the web offered a nice way to ease into retirement. Made it there 4 years ago but am still working. Something not right about that. Still learning, every day.

[Kendo]

I would say that a "webmaster" is the person highest in any chain who is responsible for web management, whether it be website or network. On a corporate network that might be the network administrator and not the web designer. In an Internet service that might be the server manager and not the network administrator. For any site owner not dependent on others that might be them.

[aristotle]

Well what's great about the web is that it's amazingly cheap to set up a website. This gives one person the opportunity to reach a large audience at little cost.

[EditorialGuy]

I'm not single, I'm married, but our editorial travel-planning site (which has been around in one form or another since the mid-1990s) is strictly a mom-and-pop operation. I don't use the word "Webmaster," though, since that's a word that has (or at least used to have) a very specific definition. I prefer "site owner" or "Web publisher."

[RedBar]

@EG

Surely you were a blogger before blogging was coined? :-)

[lucy24]

I'm not single, I'm married

Y’know, I was sitting on my hands trying to avoid making that particular crack :)

[EditorialGuy]

Surely you were a blogger before blogging was coined? :-)

I think it's more accurate to say that I was writing "evergreen" content before that term was coined. I'm from the era when "last in, first out" was just an accounting concept. :-)

[LostOne]

I haven't given the term a thought in years, but I do recall using a link to contact 'the webmaster'

Basically one site since 2002 that evolved with a name change. Had to evolve, otherwise I'd be working for someone. That does NOT work for me.

Yup. Panda was the turning point.

I'm lost too...hehe

[Rndm]

Interesting thread and posts. I am not very familiar with the publisher world. As I said I primarily work with medium to large b2b companies so I am more used to seeing titles like Chief technology officer, software architect, qa analyst, front end programmer, back end programmer, network administrator, etc.

I do have a very small blog that I run. However, I would just call myself a blogger or maybe a site owner. Thanks for sharing.

[RedBar]

The thing is Randm I would say most "publishers" here are jack-of-all-trades, basically we have to know how to do most of it and what we don't know, where to go find out and actually get it.

I'm not a "publisher" per se, principally I create B2B corporate brochure sites, sure they're published on the web however they are not there for ad-earning revenue, they're for corporate marketing information and promotion.

Most of the older hands here all do different things and many of them do it all, insofar as website creation is concerned, such as actual original template coding with a text editor, photo and image generation plus optimisation, SEO skills, content writing, actual site hosting and email configurations, DB management, and loads of other "little" jobs that we do hence the term webmaster.

We still exist and many of us are very successful at it ... and happy:-)