Webmaster

For the Danish cyberpunk comedy film from 1998, see Webmaster (film). For the athletic teams of the University of Cebu, see UC Webmasters.

A webmaster is a person responsible for maintaining one or more websites. The title may refer to web architects, web developers, site authors, website administrators, website owners, website coordinators, or website publishers.

The duties of a webmaster could include:

• Creating, editing, and publishing content on the website, either independently or with other content creators
• Content placement
• Managing a website's appearance, user access rights, and navigation
• Ensuring that the web servers, hardware and software are operating correctly
• A/B testing
• Analysing traffic through the site
• Ensuring the website is up to date and functioning correctly, e.g. installing updates, fixing bugs and errors, and optimizing performance
• Optimizing the website's content and structure to improve its ranking in search engines (SEO), e.g. keyword research, link building, and optimizing meta tags and titles

• Meta tags are short pieces of HTML code that educate search engines and other internet platforms about a web page. Search engines can better assess a page's relevance to certain search queries thanks to their concise descriptions of its content. A few of the crucial elements that make up meta tags generator include the title tag, description tag, and keyword tag.

The title tag serves as the title of your web page and is displayed as the clickable headline in search engine results. It should accurately summarize the content of your page while incorporating relevant keywords.

• Keeping the site secure, e.g. installing security software, monitoring for threats, and implementing practices for data protection
• Analytics, e.g. monitoring the website's traffic and performance to make informed decisions about its content
• Customer support, e.g. troubleshooting any issues that users may be experiencing.

Due to the RFC 822 requirement for establishing a "postmaster" email address for the single point of contact for the email administrator of a domain, the "webmaster" address and title were unofficially adopted by analogy for the website administrator. RFC 2142, which turned this common practice into a standard.

Webmasters may be generalists with HTML expertise who manage most or all aspects of web operations. Depending on the nature of the websites they manage, webmasters may be required to know scripting languages such as ColdFusion, JavaScript, JSP, .NET, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. They may also need to know how to configure web servers such as Apache and be a server administrator. Most server roles, however, would be overseen by an IT Administrator.

See also

• Chief web officer
• Database administrator
• Postmaster (computing)
• Web design