WebMaster Defined!

The "webmaster" is conceptually a new position, and the webmaster's primary responsibilities in your organization are likely just as open to definition.

Maintenance of a complex and successful Web server within your organization requires a number of people with particular skills. These skills will be required to fulfill the following responsibilities:

• Selection of the Web server and its software and hardware.
• Managing the system and the Web server.
• Determining the network bandwidth requirements.
• Assisting individuals responsible for maintaining the content.
• Selecting a standard set of authoring tools for editing.
• Implementing the Web server.
• Performing periodic backups of the system and Web server.
• Initial testing of the Web server.
• Registering the server and basic promotion.
• Regular monitoring and reporting of server activity.
• Responding to "webmaster" mail.
• Regular system and server maintenance.
• Integrating the Web server with other systems at your site.
• Planning for growth.

One thing you might notice about this list of responsibilities is that none of the webmaster duties has anything to do with organizing or maintaining Web pages. This is not an oversight; a good rule to follow is that the webmaster should not become responsible for authoring many of a site's Web pages. Although this might seem to be a contradiction, consider that webmaster responsibilities outside of a Web page's content are pretty substantial for one person.

Note

Notice the difference between "server" and "system". Web server software runs on a computer system. Many times webmasters are responsible not only for managing the Web server software, but also for managing the computer system where the Web server resides.