What is a Webmaster?

What is a webmaster?

The name sounds exciting, but what exactly is a webmaster? This profession is also called a web administrator or website administrator, and that is exactly what this position entails: you manage a website. What does that mean? You are responsible for the perfect functioning of the website. When necessary, you update the website and fix bugs and malfunctions if you encounter them. So you are not involved in building the website; your responsibilities only start once the website is finished.

Because you do not necessarily program as a webmaster, this position within IT mainly focuses on conducting analyses. You do work with a CMS (Content Management System) to keep the websites up to date, and you need knowledge of web technologies such as HTML, CSS, Javascripts and Flash.

You probably understand now that a website manager is responsible for the proper functioning of a website, but what exactly does a webmaster do on a working day? The first thing you do after entering the office is to see if there have been any new reports of problems on the website. These are mainly malfunctions or bugs noticed by visitors or other employees. A large part of your day probably involves solving these problems. Of course, some failures require more work and time than others.

You also analyze the website extensively yourself. Usually you only do this in the technical field. You think about how you can make the website perform even better, suggest those improvements and, if necessary, implement them yourself. Other webmasters also use tools such as Google Analytics to look at things such as visitor figures and findability on Google (SEO). These are usually the duties of an SEO specialist , so you only deal with this if there is no SEO team working on the website.

Finally, some web administrators are also responsible for adding new content to the website. Usually this does not mean that you have to create content yourself. For example, you pass this work on to copywriters . You then ensure that the new content ends up neatly on the website.