The webmaster might be back

Not the person from 1999 with Dreamweaver and FTP access. The job itself might be making a comeback.

There was a time when one person could reasonably be responsible for most of a website. They wrote some HTML, updated content, uploaded files, fixed whatever Internet Explorer broke, and generally kept the thing alive.

We called them a webmaster.

Then websites got more important and more complicated. Design became its own discipline. Development got deeper. SEO became a profession. Then came analytics, CRO, accessibility, marketing operations, privacy, personalization, and everything else we’ve attached to the web.

That specialization made sense. But AI may be starting to bend things back in the other direction.

The distance between specialties is getting shorter

AI doesn’t make someone a senior developer, designer, analyst, and SEO expert all at once. It does make it much easier to move between those disciplines.

In my own work, I can go from looking at GA4 data to changing a component, troubleshooting JavaScript, rewriting copy, checking SEO implications, and figuring out what needs to happen in the CRM. I could do versions of that before AI. The difference now is how much further I can get before I need a specialist.

The judgment still matters. Someone has to know whether the data supports the conclusion, whether the code is safe to ship, and whether the solution actually solves the problem. But the distance between idea and execution is much shorter now.

Websites were never neatly divided anyway

A conversion problem might look like UX until you discover the page is attracting the wrong search traffic. A traffic drop might look like SEO until you realize tracking changed during a release. A broken form might involve design, JavaScript, analytics, and CRM routing before it’s actually fixed.

The website doesn’t care which department owns each part. To the person using it, it’s one system.

That’s why the connective part of web work matters. Not being the best designer, developer, analyst, and marketer in the room, but understanding enough of each to see how the pieces affect each other and knowing when a specialist should take over.

That feels surprisingly close to the original webmaster, just with considerably more tabs open.

The modern webmaster probably isn’t called a webmaster

Today we have Web Managers, Digital Experience Managers, Web Strategists, Website Product Managers, and plenty of other variations.

The title isn’t really the interesting part. What’s interesting is that after years of web work becoming more fragmented, the tools are making it practical for one person to connect more of it again.

Specialists aren’t going away. But there is more room for the person sitting in the middle: someone who understands the website as a whole and can get surprisingly far without a handoff every twelve minutes.

We killed the webmaster, built an org chart around the body, and now AI is reanimating it.

Still a terrible job title though.