The Strange Case of the Disappearing Webmaster

Whither have gone the webmasters? Perhaps following the footsteps of Elves and wizards to the lands across the western sea, victims of the advances of our emerging collaborative tech-culture. Maybe they have withdrawn to perpetual winter, finishing their lives around a fire swilling Windy Kilts. Either way, they hold an honored place in the short but fascinating history of the Web, and we can bid them our fondest wishes and a sweet good-riddance.

But I exaggerate, a bit. Webmasters are still with us, but with changing roles in teams of specialists. Waiting time has turned into work flow, writers and editors make content, and developers mash data and applications - thanks, in part, to better tools. They'll find their place according to their actual competencies. The more technical minded will be developers and sysadmins, the designers will be designers, and the writers will be writers or editors. The badly-coded templates will some day be the goodly-coded templates written by the CMS. The webmasters are moving to specialist roles while handing off the repetition and the slavish adherence to standards to a machine; and we should all be glad if we ever hope to make progress towards findability and accessibility.

And yet, change doesn't come without anxiety, nor with unqualified glee. As the WebLion project at Penn State rolls out at dizzying speed, there are people pushing back. Most commonly, I hear concerns that jobs will disappear as applications and servers will make staff positions redundant. (I'm paraphrasing, of course, but I've spoken to many with the same concern since 2001 when I first started pounding the table for content management systems at the Penn State Web Conference). I think most concerns I hear are related to that, and if I believed that were true, I would be freaking, too.

So, here's my story, and in its way is an answer to that concern: When I started my first position as “Webmaster” (I cringe) in 1999, my job consisted of 90% clerical and touch-up design work, and 10% development work. Having been an engineer up to that time, I was going to get bored, really fast. I had to do something. Casting about, I noticed my predecessor had been experimenting with databases serving Web content; and I had written a Web application in '96. (News flash: by coincidence, I recently learned that that application is still in use at Penn State. Knock me over with a feather, why dontcha!).

Moreover, there was talk of new applications called content management systems that allowed subject experts without web skills to write for the Web. The only problem is that they were commercial systems with unreachable prices reflecting their first-to-market advantage. “OK, I'll build one”, I said. And I did it by (forgive me, Terry Etherton, I never told you this) inflating my estimated time to deliver on my tasks, and using that surplus time to build the database and page templates. The coding and implementation really sucked, but nobody else knew, and most importantly, it saved me time. A lot of time. By 2002, when version 1 of the CMS was more or less finished, warts and bandages and all, I was spending perhaps 25% of my time on clerical work and design tweaks, and 75% on development. By version 3, my only contact with clerical duties was with special situations. I was a full time developer and feeling fine.

My answer is this. When a new category of tools come online and disrupt old patterns of work, you can turn change to your advantage. Content management systems - WebLion - is that tool.

What do you think?