The webmaster was once, quite literally, the master of their domain. Whatever request came through for the website, they could handle, be it a HTML tweak or fix to the server. Their skills evolved with the web, and there was very little they couldn’t handle. Self-taught and always learning, the best sites around had a dedicated webmaster or two.
Then, sometime in the last 20 years, the webmaster disappeared. Amidst the new world of Web 2.0, it was suddenly very hard to find a webmaster, replaced instead by large agencies and expanding homegrown teams. But where did they go? To answer that question, we’ll have to do a bit of digging to trace when and where they vanished from sight. Once we know that we can answer an even more fundamental question: how can we capture the spirit of the webmaster once more?