A site author, web developer, or simply a webmaster is the person behind website maintenance for not only personal sites, but also SMEs and large regional, national and global companies. Depending on the size of the website, more than one webmaster may be required. It is not unusual to get a team of webmasters working together to maintain a site, so long as the site gets some few hundred thousand or even millions of visitors with each passing day. The duties bestowed upon a webmaster are not complicated, and although they are mostly technical, they are easy to understand nonetheless.
The most obvious one is the aforementioned one of maintaining a website. This in other words means keeping an eye on the website and its performance, technically speaking, improving some aspects of it, and regularly updating it not only in terms of placing new content, but also adding more pages, and making it more user friendly. For this function to be achieved, the webmaster needs to exercise flexibility. They have to adjust their thinking and tune it to the nature of the website. If it is one that is bent on making sales, the webmaster is expected to know what they can improve on the site to increase sales. They should know about the best advertising and marketing policies that work. Should Adsense be used? What about SEO and PPC?
Should the website face a problem of whatever nature, the webmaster is looked upon as the problem solver. They are supposed to know what the probable causes are, and how to fix them. If one browser fails to load some aspects of the site, the webmaster is expected to know what should be adjusted to not only make the site completely visible, but decrease its loading time. Conclusively speaking from this point, they should increase the website’s user friendliness. If the website supports file downloads, the process should be fluid, and without too many redirections.
For the sites that request user membership, there are always security concerns, and these are again addressed by the webmaster. They should be able to set up security protocols to protect any data that is not meant to be shared. Encryptions should be in place to ensure that there is no file breaching of any kind. The firewall put in place should be impossible to scale for even the most seasoned hackers.
A webmaster is supposed to stay updated with the most recent technologies as far as web creation and maintenance is concerned. It is this knowledge acquired that is used in updating a site, and availing more features that will improve the sites user friendliness. The maintenance work is carried on a regular, timely basis. Since this does not take up a lot of time, a webmaster can indulge in other activities, such as content management, and website marketing through different campaigns and marketing strategies to improve the ranking of the website. The essence of doing this is directly proportional to the commercial importance of the site.
