All About A Webmaster

A webmaster is the creator of a website. These are people who design and create their own sites. A webmaster can either work for themselves creating sites to make money from or them can work as a webmaster for another company. Webmasters have many tasks to do in their profession. In addition to creating a website they are also responsible for maintenance. About 25 percent of webmasters day will consist of performing maintenance on a site. Maintenance includes updating or adding content, adding new offers as well as removing any old offers that are not making any money.
A webmaster also perform programming tasks. About 40 percent of a webmasters time is dedicated to programming , some sites use Perl and others use C programming. A webmaster's job as a programmer involves rewriting the site at times or adding in new programs or removing existing programs. A part of a webmasters job is a developer. In this task, the webmaster will focus on creating new pages and developing new ideas and writing new content.
A webmaster can also be a graphic designer if they are a jack of all trades. They can create new graphics for the site and if they are independent webmasters they can create new graphics for their sites as well as freelancing for others. You must be familiar with Adobe Photoshop with Illustrator which is a favorite among webmasters with graphic design experience.
Webmasters also perform server maintenance, either for themselves or for a company, sometimes the server that the sites are on need to be updated for have some preventative maintenance done. These sites and all of the webmasters work has to be backed up in case of a crash and you want the server to be holding these files to be in perfect working order. A major duty of a professional webmaster is called Release Engineering. This is where a webmaster develops and takes the scripts that move the web pages from the creation server to the production server. Source codes control systems must be maintained and the system should be checked for viruses and bugs.
Overall a webmaster must know HTML for coding, CGI, Perl or C programming, they must posses artistic ability especially graphic artist ability. A webmaster must know how to write properly in order to create content for their site. They should know others programming such as Java Script, Flash or Ajax. They must be knowledgeable in server side programming that includes SSI, ASP, PHP and Cold Fusion. They also must know database knowledge for sites that carry databases.
If you want the more abstract definition of what a webmaster is, is they are web site creators that use online media methods to sell products or provide a service. When a webmaster works purely for themselves they can either create a web site that they are going to keep for themselves and monetize it for income or they are going to freelance and create web sites for customer for a specific price.
Either way they must have the skills to be an all around webmaster , someone who knows the task at hand from A to Z. With new technologies coming out all the time, the webmaster must keep on top of all the latest programs and on all the latest changes in the existing programs. That is what makes a successful webmaster. Other names for webmasters are webmistress as the feminine version, they are called web designers, web site administrator and system administrator. There are trade school and college courses you can take if you are interested in becoming a webmaster or you can be adventurous and become a self taught webmaster.

Source :  http://www.yourmaindomain.com/web-articles/what-is-webmaster.asp