Reading my e-mail this morning I came across an article entitled A Question of Degree. It was all about who qualifies to call themselves a web-developer. The following is an excerpt from Goodies to Go.
Do you suppose you qualify as a web developer if you're only tweaking the code of pre-selected templates? I guess you would consider that using pre-fabricated elements. So we're all web-developers? Web-designers? Personally, I consider a web developer to be the person who makes those pre-fab elements and writes all that code to get things working. I consider myself to be a web designer. A tweaker of codes and templates. Most of the sites I have designed over the years started with templates that I re-designed and modified to suit my purposes. Think of a dress-maker who re-designs a piece of clothing. They didn't make the original, but they gave it a new look.
So what is a webmaster? Is that the person who designed the site and continues to maintain it? I hope so, because I get all my mail from my various sites addressed to The Webmaster. I hope I'm not entitling myself to something I cannot claim. Webmaster, web-designer and web-developer are all fairly similar, though the developer would surely be more involved with the actual code-writing, while the master makes sure things continue to work how they were intended. It can be quite confusing when we start to use labels.
If you would like more quantifications, here is another interesting article from Occupational Guides.
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