What is a Webmaster?

A webmaster is the position given to a person responsible for maintaining one or more websites of a company. The position came about for the need of having someone to fulfill these duties and after once it was required for there to be a single point of contact for those who administered a domain and as such, the "webmaster" title unofficially became tied to "web administrator".

Although the title’s duties may be broad, it is still often supplemented by other job titles and responsibilities. This list includes web architects, web developers, site authors, website administrators, website coordinators, and website publishers. As a matter of fact, more often than not, a person may refer to themselves as one of the aforementioned titles before saying “webmaster”.

Duties

As mentioned before, the duties of a webmaster are usually pretty broad, but some of these duties might include ensuring that web servers, hardware, and software are operating correctly. For this reason, the title might also be used alongside web developers and website administrators as this duty of maintenance overlaps between the positions. They can also be responsible for designing the website and generating and revising web pages; duties which overlaps with the duties of a web developer and web architect, monitoring website traffic and handling server access and rights which overlaps with the duties of a website administrator, and finally, replying to user comments which falls under the duties of a website coordinator.

Depending on the detail of the duties involved, some webmasters might even have to know certain languages to carry out their duties; such as Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript (JS), PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), Perl, Ruby, ColdFusion, Python, Go, or some combination of them all. If the website is specifically involved in e-commerce, the webmaster’s duties may also require him to use some type of e-commerce software such as Squarespace as well.

Conclusion

While the term might be used loosely in the modern-day world, there is no website that functions without having some type of webmaster behind it; even if they exist through the use of some type of Content Management System (CMS) or otherwise. As such, it is ideal to know precisely what jobs and task your website is supposed to carry out and as such, what type of duties is to be expected of the person behind it. This will give developers a strong idea as to what duties their webmaster to carry out and skills they should possess and will overall.