Having a CMS Does Not Mean You Don't Need a Webmaster

Don't get me wrong - I love having my customers work with their Content Managed Systems (CMS) - their sites are active, alive, and higher ranked than a similar static site would be. It relieves me of much of the drudge-work of being a webmaster - the minor syntax and spelling fixes, changes in staff information, etc. and lets me concentrate on some of the other things that I and my staff enjoy doing.

The problem is not with my customers - it's with some of the people I see on the various CMS support lists who simply don't have a clue how a web site goes together. We're not talking about content or graphics or what the web viewer sees - we're talking about things like style sheets, changes to templates and web server setup and tuning. These things are very technical in nature and a lot of people fail to grasp that in some cases it takes literally years of experience to know how to get the best out of them and make the rest of the system function correctly. I know, I have more experience in much of this than most people and I still get baffled by some of the problems I come across.

As one of the co-owners of Wimsey Information Services (wimsey.com), Canada's first commercial ISP, I wrote some of the fist web pages in Canada and taught HTML to many of the first crop of Vancouver's now burgeoning community of web professionals. Our servers in 1994 and 1995 put out more web pages than any other ISP in Canada, and I and my staff set them up and helped most of the sites create and grow their web presence.

We've come a long way since that time:

• Microsoft abandoned their hopes of creating a parallel, world-wide network and in 6 months completely turned around to embrace the internet
• Despite IIS (Microsoft's web server) Apache, the open source web server, has grown to be the most used web server in the world
• PHP has grown to be the language of choice for active web sites in general and CMS sites in particular
• Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has become a powerful method of achieving good control over content layout despite the differences in browsers, video screen sizes and underlying hardware capabilities (think of the differences between a 16x9 wide screen vs. the screen of an iPhone and understand that CSS can deal with them)
• Template engines have been created that enable programmers to create supremely sophisticated systems that still have excellent core security and useability characteristics.
• The search engines and their ever-changing algorithms now influence much of the way that web sites in general do things.
• And last but not least - the "hacker" culture has been taken over by organized crime and security "hardening" is no longer just a matter of using good passwords.

All of the above must be taken into consideration when you are trying to get the most out of your web site, no matter how it is created. A professional webmaster is constantly learning about the new search requirements, new features and "gotchas" in page layout and tools, and potential and real security threats. No matter how your site content is created and managed, you still need someone who watches the overall web system your site is part of, be it a generic hosted system with a Cpanel front-end, or your own in-house or server-farm server system. A single change to the wrong setting can make your site vulnerable to attack or make your site unreadable to some of your valuable customers and potential customers.

If nothing else, you probably need a professional webmaster to translate the answers you get from the tech support for your server location. Seems that's something some of my customers value the most :)