Along with the emergence and growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web has come the creation of a new occupation: the webmaster. This person is responsible for publishing a website, which may be a single page or hundreds of thousands of pages. It is difficult to be precise about what a webmaster does, because the web itself is changing, and this in turn changes the way in which people use it. Some people consider the term "webmaster" to be an unnecessarily sexist term. Alternate terms include "webster," "web designer," and "information architect."

A group of web-page designers work together to evaluate a design in their San Francisco office, which is located in an area that is home to so many high tech businesses that it is sometimes called the "Cybergulch." (Catherine Karnow/Corbis)

A key role for the webmaster is to be responsible for organizing the...