The Difference between a Webmaster and Web Developer

Once upon a time there was a server. The guy who ran the server was one serious geek. The people who used the server were scientists working on the Theory of Relativity and that sort of extremely useful stuff. They wrote lots of notes with all kinds of symbols and mathematical formulae. Those scientists did all this at a place called CERN.
 
Now CERN was a huge laboratory in Switzerland. There were floors of some very expensive kit - IBM mainframes that covered more acreage than some of the big car dealers in Los Angeles.
 
One of the scientists had some notes he wanted to share with another guy, but they were quite a way apart and it involved a walk through long corridors and across a snow laden landscape.
 
Upon hearing of their plight a nearby programmer came up with this incredibly brilliant idea. He wrote a new programming language and called it HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Now all the boffins at CERN could see each others notes without getting their feet cold during the Swiss winter and continue their enormously important work.
 
HTML developed over the years into the basis for all the documents on the Internet. To make them look pretty, graphic designers (such as yours truly) took up the challenge and converted beautifully printed, corporate brochures into web documents that everyone on the Internet could see. Huge websites were developed by these people as they teamed up with programmers to make the sites more complex and interactive.
 
Smaller agencies and studios usually comprised of one or two guys who did everything. The designer ended up wearing several hats (never a tie). Visual literacy, artistic talent and creative impulses were counterbalanced with a bit of logic and copy/script writing - all fueled by cigarettes, pizzas, chocolate chip cookies and gallons of coffee. And . . . they became known as Web Developers.
 
However . . . . . for all that work to be seen - somebody out there had to have a server and - know how to put it together, program it, keep it running, administrate its users, answer the telephone, have terrific bladder control and generally communicate in a language nobody else could understand. That somebody is a Webmaster.

- Ted Hawkins, © 2001