What is a Webmaster, exactly?

[Psmith0000]

Hi all. As an admin/marketing person for a small consulting firm with a website, I am tasked with improving our web traffic and sales. As a result, I have spent a lot of time educating myself on this forum. I am unclear on some basic web issues. What do webmasters do? Do you all work for someone else, or do you own your own sites? Do you webmast for multiple sites? How does this work and what tasks fall under your job title?

I'm wondering if we will eventually need a part time webmaster...

Thanks

[curlykarl]

"I'm wondering if we will eventually need a part time webmaster"

Educate yourself here, its more rewarding and cheaper :)

Karl

[webwoman]

If you are being asked to improve your web traffic and sales, you will definitely need a webmaster. Websites don't take care of themselves...the webmaster adds new pages, creates interesting little hooks to get people to buy your product, submits your site to the search engines, makes changes to the site to make it more attractive to the search engines, gets your website into directories and e-zines and other places where potential buyers will find it, tracks the traffic statistics to see what's working, what's not, and on and on. The many thousands of posts and articles here are the answer to your question: "What is a Webmaster?"

Oh, and by the way, welcome to Webmaster World! It's a wonderful world filled with fascinating whacky people who are never quite satisfied and feel a compulsion to change the world wide web - a little each day :)

[SethCall]

A webmaster, in terms of what they DO is sometimes hard to define, as it really is quite gray.

I would say, at its core, is the ability to make webpages. Beyond that, you MIGHT do the art, or you MIGHT do the scripting (like .asp, or .php. or javascript). And seriously, *anyone* with a little bit of drive can learn all these things.

Then there is the other 90% of being a real webmaster: doing all this WELL. thats the hard part ;)

Programming for the web is all about being the most efficient, (small download size, most pleasing to the eye, top on the search engines, making scripts that dont tax the server, having your webpages look the the same/simliar, if show up at all, on the most browsers). ANd you will find that there are ALOT of small things that only experience can tell you: or these forums.

----------------------------------
First you gotta learn HTML.

Then, or hopefully at the same time, you learn Cascading Style Sheets, (CSS). These go hand in hand, and all you need to know is on these forums.

Then you might want to learn javascript, or DHTML (dynamic HTML), to make interesting things happen on your client's browser.

Then you may want to learn flash or *maybe* java for applets.

Or at the same time

Server-side scripts, which means little programs on the web server that produce web pages "on the fly" according to what the situation dictates.

IM just rambling sorry ;)_

[henry0]

It goes further
a webmaster is very often in charge of the production server and its security

Do not hesitate, consult and check cost VS services
you will find that paying a pro well worth it

my clients know they can reach me even on weekend, its part of the deal at least my way :)

[webwoman]

PSmith...now that we have you *thoroughly* confused - doesn't it sound like the absolutely best job ever? Seriously, you can learn everything you need to know here. And the forum participants can be counted upon to be very helpful - even when you think you're asking a stupid question. Hope this starts a new adventure for you at your job...