Yet these untrained neophyte fumblers are exactly the ones who are most profoundly changing the face of computing, the computer industry, and in fact, humanity. It is they who are building the infrastructure, the communities, the very world we are quickly migrating into. This is an excellent question and one that is too often missed by managers who are tasked with the job of hiring a web staff posthaste. More importantly, it is a question that is too often knocked to the end of the queue by webmasters themselves who are trying to learn a lifetime worth of technology in the period of a six month review. Yet it is exactly the question that must be answered first if you are to build anything of substance and permanence with your skills.
Web mastering only begins with technology.
Artistic and social activities take up the rest of the time. Only those who can understand this will be able to create web communities with long term viability. The fact is that few people really understand what it takes to design, develop and manage a successful web site because the job has not been around for very long. People have no good standards to judge what they need to know or how to make sense of qualifications. Well, one good way to define something is to break that thing down into concrete understandable pieces.