Webmaster and Admin wheres the diversity

Me again, which shouldn't be a big shock since this is my blog, I was talking with a friend recently and joked about how he always opens with a generic comment and he said it helps get peoples attention (or something like that, I had been drinking at the time - hmm pear cider :D).

So hope every ones having a great day(was that nice enough, let me know, leave comments or PM me on the club.

Anyways I was on a forum earlier and there was a big issue with someone complaining about the admin but suggested his admin skills reflected him as a webmaster, this raised an issue with me I have had for a while, so many people link admins and webmasters as the same thing when there the same thing. Most admins are pretty much useless when it comes to websites, I have even seen forum staff refer to themselves as webmasters when the only site they have owned is a page generated one (such as geocities and tripod) where they couldn't even make text bold.

The point of this post is to show what in my opinion an admin and a webmaster does, as I consider myself to be both (because I run/design websites and I administrate forums).

Webmaster

Compared to administrators a rarity, there seems to be so few people who actually know anything about web design/running a website, I have seen far too many forums where theres no one who can create a basic html page, some I have worked for as admin and then been pushed into re-designing or upgrading because the owner/admins are clueless to anything that isn't BBCode. In fact from recent memory theres only one website I worked for that I offered to do the layout for and that was jakeisawesome.com (which has since closed), the rest I was forced into. So to summarise webmasters are the guys who can run the website and keep it running without needing help for every little thing.

Administrator

It seems these days every ones an admin, its simple to just sign up for a free forum, I have seen smaller forums which as soon as they launch say get 10 posts and become an admin, my first admin job that wasn't on a site I owned was pretty much handed to me and as a result I received a lot of bitterness and while I feel I did well in the long run when I admined there all I was is what I would call a glorified moderator, I ran the boards but did nothing technical, it was after that the owner of jakeisawesome.com Thomas Rule the owner of Stick Guy who had then launched a forum (the smack talk forums) where I was eventually made admin and was offered the opportunity to work on the technical side, modifying the VBulletin templates, creating skins and working with basic php.

Its hard to define the position of an admin, I usually call myself a technical admin as I usually deal with the technical aspects of forums and let Soulz deal with the people side of The Club, I would also call Soulz an admin because while I adminster over the technical side he adminsters over the front end and adds content such as smilies and skins.


To sum things up it feels like the lines separating admins and webmasters have become blurry in a time where webmasters are fading away, why would anyone want to learn web design when they could just create a myspace and load it with crap. Finding a webmaster is a lucky thing because you are usually in a better situation if something messes up since a webmaster can quickly fix it, while the average forum admin would be clueless.

Sites to check out:

Rampant Designs Baby Seal Productions Stick Guy The Club BSP Blog Stick Guy Blog