A List Apart (ALA) released findings from the biggest survey ever about web professionals (or ‘people who make websites’, to quote ALA baseline). About 33,000 professionals took the survey during spring 2007, so it can claim to give a good overview of the internet crew.

What stroke me most is the tiny amount of female web-whatever, but I’m biaised. And that neither ‘Web Administrator’ nor ‘Content Manager’ seem to be a common title for such jobs. Anyway, I will have to become an Information Architect as they seem to get bigger salaries.

Go and check where you sit among salary, work hours and education level figures. Cherry on the cake: raw data is also available (anonymised, of course).

“Content Manager” is what I like to call my job. 10 years ago, when the webmaster was invented, the major issue on the web was to send pages live, just to be there (“Of course, Whatever Ltd has a website”). Then the webmaster, the one knowing how to create and update html pages, was to rule the web forever.

Then CMS (Content Management System) were created to improve the website update process or perhaps only to create a new buzz word. The purpose of CMS was to allow each member of one given organisation to create and update the pages, a good way around Bottle-Neck-Webmaster or a good way for the Webmaster to spare his precious time and use it on more exciting tasks. Some people even thought they would get rid of the Webmaster for ever, so happy they were because they would at least be free to illustrate their pages with Flash animation stored in tables stored in frames.

Ideally each website should now be managed by a robust, user friendly and up to date CMS. But it didn’t happen. Some sites use an old CMS they would like to get rid of, others would just like to have one but the pages existing from 1999 are not that easy to migrate. There are also cases where only one part is ‘CMSed’, while the other part is maintained with our old friends Dreamweaver and/or Frontpage. Some websites even have two or more different CMS…

As soon as you say “let’s get a CMS”, you are to say shortly “how many templates should we use”, “should we migrate the finance section before the HR section”, “how can we properly manage our addresses and contact details”, etc. To deal with these issues, the Webmaster is still here (sometimes you call him a Website Manager or a Web Administrator or a Web Editor but it is still the same person). The job has changed, it is now more about analysing the structure of websites and content creation process. Nowadays the Webmaster spends a lot of his time juggling with multiple tools and users levels to get the website working, producing attractive, efficient, standard and accessible pages.

The time has come to call the Webmaster his true name, which according to me is: ‘Content Manager’. But you may prefer an other title? We are the people between the system and the live website. We are partly in Information Technology, a lot in Information Architecture and more or less in Web Design, but not specialised in any of these.

As a Content Manager I have created this blog to share my daily adventures, with a particular focus on methodologies rather than technologies. Because implementing a CMS is not enough to actually manage content, I think that content management is a new profession which still has to be defined.