I was looking over Slashdot again and the Ask Slashdot story “Who Killed The Web Master” got me thinking.
I personally am designated as a Web Programmer, or Web Application Developer (Senior - had to throw that in somewhere). There is a second position that is open that my company is about to fill (already have the applicant, they just have to accept) where the position is a Web Master…
In the long run, the other person would be a web master because they’re in charge of a full website that is completely static content. I’m in charge of a few internal projects/websites as well, but its more on the programming side with a little free reign on looks, which is why I go with CSS.
So, what really happened to the official “Web Master” positions, even though “we” sometimes use them?
I honestly think we’ve split the “web master” into two groups.
- Web Developer
- Programmer/Web Application Developer
In my
But separating these two categories is good. You can get more work out each person than 1 person. Again, I’m a coder, if someone asks me to design a full website, its going to take be twice as long because I’m not that visually creative (yes, I’m 1 person on earth that will admit that…)
Now, tell me to create a website that will pick your nose and I’ll try my best to build it in less time than the next guy, but your average web developer will build a flash application or some animated graphic to show you how its done.
I’m probably going to get in trouble for saying this, but I think the quality of people getting into coding now are below the line - wayyyy below the line.
For instance, I spent an entire day today helping a help desk tech that was in charge of a knowledge base, the basics of HTML. I couldn’t believe that 1, the project manager put someone with no web experience in charge of the project and 2, the fact that this poor guy freaked out (yes, freaked out, whined that he needed to buy software, etc) when I told him that we only had 1 license of DreamWeaver and that he absolutely couldn’t open the page in FrontPage. This poor guy panicked so bad, he ran to his project manager and BEGGED for us to install a second copy (ie: 1 license on 2 computers) of DreamWeaver on his computer. Then he got upset when I said that FrontPage would change the code of the project too much for it to interact with CSS properly. I then showed him the difference between my mode and something he had designed. Unfortunately (fortunately?) FP had placed style sheets on almost everything, even if there wasn’t anything to style.
This is someone that is supporting computers, that volunteered for the project and expected that the company knowledge base should be Doc files on a network shared drive. Ouch. If that didn’t sting, read that first sentence again. I actually feel sorry for the guy. I had to sit down and explain HTML to him, and like a cliche, he wanted to change the clean, crisp, CSS layout to include spinning Gifs adding Java menu’s all over the page and inserting a custom banner with a black background that wasn’t sized right when the page was various shades of gray.
Bless his little heart, he moved into my office for a bit to be able to ask me questions, but questions every 5-10 minutes tend to cause concentration problems.
I truely feel sorry for this guy. He has no clue about web design. I’m sorry if I say this, but HTML is about as basic as BASIC is… In today’s day and age, I honestly expected a help desk tech to be able to code a little bit of HTML. Maybe one of these days my expectations will be down on a level that is normal with society. By then, it’ll probably be time to retire or die.
Oh, and as for my professional opinion on who killed the web master? Over achieving project managers that wanted to micro manage 2 people instead of 1…
