Darryl Patterson

I’m know that I’m going to take some flak for this blog post, I hope that nobody takes it personal.

I generally ask questions when I blog, using those questions to come to conclusions. This time around, I’m going to start with two important conclusions:

1. Webmasters never really existed;
2. We don’t need web designers.

I’ve had many conversations over the years regarding both statements, so let me explain what I mean by them.

Webmasters Never Really Existed

I’ve always hated the term webmaster – especially when I held the title. My problem with webmaster is that no one really knew what it meant; it didn’t clearly explain the roles & responsibilities of the position. You’d see job postings for people who knew everything from HTML, JavaScript, ColdFusion, Java or CGI/Perl to people that knew Photoshop, Illustrator (eventually Fireworks & Flash too), web design and copywriting. Not to mention knowing how web servers worked! Each post would be a hodge-podge of various combinations of these skills, and sometimes employers expected them all!

I always understood the definition of a webmaster to be someone who took care of the web server and performs the maintenance of content; it’s not the person who programs the website or designs the website.

The term “webmaster” is very much like the terms “DHTML” or “Web 2.0″ – there is no clear definition. They aren’t single things, but a combination of things that people like to lump together because they don’t really understand them. It’s great to have resources like Wikipedia that act as a central repository for defining such things, but even there, the current definition for webmaster is quite vague & broad.

Luckily, now that the world wide web is over 17 years old, we’ve grown up; we know that building a website takes more than one person, more than one expertise. Take a look at blogs. The engine behind the blog sites is written by very competent developers. The creative “look & feel” is usually contributed by professional designers. The navigation & functionality are designed by information architects. Only the copy is written by the blogger. This in addition to many other roles you find in web application development today.

So back to my point – webmaster never really existed. What did exist, were professionals that were really good at their chosen field (many of them self-taught) who learned enough about the web as a whole to get by on their own. For me, webmaster is a fictional title given to these people by the folks who didn’t understand the web at the time.

I hope to someday see the definition in Wikipedia to reflect this fiction.

We Don’t Need Web Designers

I’ve been telling people this for quite some time now, just in casual conversation; I think the time is right to put myself on a limb on this one. And I’m happy to say that the agency I work for holds many of the same ideals.

When I started developing for the web (roughly 1993), I started working with designers. It was inevitable that the designers came from print, since web design didn’t really even exist yet. As I learned more about the technical side of the web (HTML, CGI/Perl, Java, ColdFusion, etc…), I started to get really frustrated with the total lack on understanding traditional designers had of the web medium. But instead of giving up, I figured I’d try to help them “get it.” It was never easy… not once.

As time went on, people started calling themselves web designers; these were people who supposedly could design for the web. I saw two trends with web designers:

1. They were traditional designers who knew a little HTML;
2. They were self taught people who knew HTML, but had no design background.

In most cases, they still sucked.

The people in #1 came up with some great looking designs that were simply impossible to execute (Fireworks helped with these designs when it came out… thanks Macromedia, RIP). Because they “knew” HTML, they would argue that it could be done – they’ve seen it done. What they often failed to see are those subtle little differences in design… the difference between an outstanding design that just blew people away, and the design that looked like a print brochure and had to be one big JPEG or GIF. Yuck!

The folks coming in from #2 certainly knew how the web worked. They knew HTML inside out and backwards, they were intimate with the challenges of table-based design techniques (thanks to CSS2 for ending that nonsense), they knew how it all fit together. The only problem: their designs stank! Sites were always built from the HTML up, which just didn’t work.

Yes, there were the very rare designers that had just the right mix, usually with a strong design background and an open mind. These were the people developers worked with, not against. These were the true web designers. They started creeping into the scene in the mid to late 1990’s and continued into the early 2000’s. It was a great time for design on the world wide web.

Enter 2008. The web has been around since 1991 (conceived in 1989 I think). Seventeen years old! My how it’s grown. We now have a very mature medium in the world wide web. Advertisers and marketers are taking it very serious, so much so that advertising budgets are being shuffled around to include less television & outdoor and more on-line. The web is something that most folks interact with on a daily basis – they get the medium, they understand how people use it.

The common body of knowledge in relation to the web is at the point where it truly is ubiquitous (I’m nowhere near the first person to say that). There certainly was a time when we needed specialist designers – web designers – to come up with great web creative. I would argue that that’s no longer the case; we just need great designers!

There is very little that cannot be done on the web today; the limitations we once faced are gone. Let the creative ideas flow, let the designers do what they do best. Let the web production artists and web developers execute the designer’s great designs.