If you have been around on the web for ten years or more you will remember (or maybe even filled the role) of the mythical “WebMaster”. The WebMaster would design and program your site. He (or she… but lets be honest girls. Mostly he) would publish your articles and fix your site when broken. He’d do some voodoo behind the scene and something very close to what you wanted would happen. He’d tell you what would work on the net and what wouldn’t. He would not be questioned. He was The WebMaster.

Ok, so usually the WebMaster was someone’s cousin who knew HTML, where to cut’n paste JavaScript snippets from and generally no marvel to behold, but it was a title not to be taken lightly and godsdamnit we held it in high regard.

But I’m not here to wax poetic about the lost title of The WebMaster. I’m here to talk about how the position, once highly esteemed, as a “Jack of all trades” ¹ in, well, WebMastery; fits into the calculation nowadays.

When I was working as a freelancer being a “Jack of all trades” was a terrific boon to me. Being able to tell my customers I could do the job of designer, programmer and Flash animator ² in one made my propositions very attractive.
And I didn’t do too bad either, because even though I wouldn’t describe myself as a renaissance man by any means I was fairly proficient in each discipline on a small scale. I was walking the path of the WebMaster.

The Webmaster as we knew him is gone, but the Jack of all trades is still live and kicking. The first time I got a job in the private sector I was baffled to find that the Web Designers didn’t even know what an HTML tag was, and that the front-end developers ³ wouldn’t open Photoshop other than to “fix the mess the fucking designers left behind” which usually meant cropping their PSD’s and exporting for web.
Nowadays I don’t touch the design in any way, shape or form in my professional life. I’ll advise designers whenever I see them come up with some idea that’ll break the site / app we’re working on, but other than that I’ll yell for a Designer even for small adjustments. On my personal projects I’ll still do every aspect myself to the extent of my ability and I feel I’m not doing too terrible a job of it, but at the day job; I do no design work.

When I got my current job one of my strong points at the interview was indeed that I have done a lot of stuff in different fields involved in creating a web site. My skills beyond ActionScript don’t count for nothing and I’ll often be involved in different aspects of the front-end stuff, but in the end there’s no denying that the roles involved in the production of any site or app are a lot more segregated and specialized .

It amazes me that some of the back-end guys and gals are so unfamiliar with common JavaScript issues, and I’m sure they’re equally amazed at my complete newbism with any CMS more complicated than WordPress and that I have only a miniscule idea about how a MySQL database actually works.
And perhaps this is actually a good thing. Not to the extent that you don’t know what your neighbor does, but having highly specialized professionals for each area of a production is probably not only preferable but even a necessity when you work with large and expensive projects for customers that have high demands with regards to quality and support.

A very real example is my own immediate surroundings. I have very talented designers all around me, and I wouldn’t touch their turf with a telescope and a Mars Rover, but I can still tell when they get it wrong when it comes to usability. Not as good however as our Usability team.
Our local ActionScript shogun is extremely good at what he does, and I (frequently) bow to his expertise, but he can’t center a

on a page.
Across from me is a guy who has written his own CMS in PHP, but I can still drop some knowledge on CSS and JavaScript hacks, and in his own words my design eye is better than his. I’m not the most talented guy at anything in my office, but I sure do have a lot more strings to play on than any one of the really specialized people.

So I miss The WebMaster. Or if not The WebMaster, then at least the days when, how to say this without causing too much of a stir… Well, the days when “Web designer” meant you knew both Photoshop and HTML and probably some JavaScript and PHP as well. Depending on the year you might even be fiddling around with some Flash.

So, what I’d love to get some outside perspective on is this:

• What are you doing? Are you a Jack of all trades? A WebMaster if you will. Or are you highly specialized in one field?
• Would you rather have diversity or specialization in yourself and /or the people you work with?
• If you’re specialized; Do you feel it’s important to understand what the other people (that do related stuff. Screw the project managers. ;)) work with? If you’re a designer; Do you know HTML? If you’re a developer; Do you have some grasp of design? Flash folks; What about HTML. HTML folks vice versa.
• If you’re in a manager position; What do you look for?
• I’d love some anecdotes about how a project went arse over tits (that’s bad) or better than expected because of one or the other of the above.
• Other thoughts?

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