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Job Titles in the Web Field

Job Titles in the Web Field

I am often asked about jobs in IT to which I respond, “well what area of IT are you interested in?”. Our field has evolved so much in the past 20 years. My area of IT especially has seen changes and new roles come into existence. I thought I would take some time and list out possible roles you might see when looking for job titles in the web field.

What you see at a company is going to vary based on how large they are and how fine-tuned they choose to be in each specialty area of the web field.

Be sure to read carefully and not skim or you will miss the humor I am going to inject in here.

Welcome to the World Wide Web and It's Variety of Specialists

None of this is possible without servers, the very backbone of the Internet. Server Admins handle everything in regard to keeping these computers happy and healthy. The server hardware itself may live in your office building or in a data center in another state; either way, the admins have access to keep the ships sailing.

These are the rockstars of the group. (I might be a little biased). They can do everything, and at smaller companies they in fact do everything. They do front-end design of websites, back-end coding for websites, database development, deployments, maintenance, etc.

These are software developers who are code-monkeys at heart. They prefer not to get involved with the front-end, having to argue with or be yo-yo’d around by other job roles at the company who have say over what things look like and change their mind all of the time. They write code that accesses the database, does all kinds of business logic, and top secret stuff I can’t tell you about 😉

These software developers are in touch with their creative-side. They build out everything that you the user see which often gets them the glory over their teammates on the backend who are often overlooked. They write code with style, that’s not a compliment; they use a thing called stylesheets. They also have to keep up to date with all of the javascript libraries and trends that change more often than I care for.

At larger companies you might have a User Experience Designer. They focus on giving users the best possible experience while on the website. They combine research, usability testing, customer feedback, and design principles to boss the Devs around. They probably think they’re better than us.

I like to think of a Web Designer as a person who assembles and configures web pages. They don’t typically write any code.

Depending on the complexity of the project, you could get by with a web designer and no developers, as long as custom coding is not involved. They’ll just find a plugin in most cases.

Let’s not forget our friend the Database Developer. They are the unsung heroes. Without our data, what do we have? They architect the structure of the database, keep it tuned, backed up, and functioning.

Hello to our artsy friends. They um, design the graphics. It’s not that simple! Well with Canva it has gotten a heck of a lot easier. Oops, I wasn’t supposed to share that secret.

They are important, seriously. They get yelled at by everybody because their work is used on the website and in social media.

Your company might be large enough that you can dedicate a person to just focus on all the words. The copywriters craft compelling clusters of words that persuade customers to give us their money.

If your company has a dedicated content creator then that person comes up with all of the content users see on the website and social media. They could do the jobs of the graphic designer and the copywriter. 

If your company has a dedicated videographer, that is your George Lucas who is going to handle the filming and editing of your video content.

Your company might not trust your web designer to handle the search engine optimization so they brought in this dude to specialize in getting your company ranking on the search engines.

This role is the guru of the social networks and is responsible for the strategies that will get our audience off the scroll wheel and onto our website. Your content creator might be the one wearing this hat or your web designer, depending on your company structure.

If you have a community manager then your company has a nice budget to be able to hire all of these specialists.

The CM interacts with the public, takes their pulse, monitors all of the comments and the word on the street about your company on the socials.

The BMS guides the direction of the company image in the public eye. So they boss around a bunch of these other roles to accomplish that.

These are the people who send you all those emails you unsubscribe from. Did I say that out loud? Don’t Unsubscribe! You will miss out on staying in the loop of all the goodness of the companies you love… and there might be coupons!

There is actually a lot of planning and strategy involved with successful email campaigns.

This is the person collecting all that data off of you with cookies, making sense of it, and reporting back to management if we’re hitting our targets. We don’t eat lunch with them.

Just kidding!

This is who you fire if we get hacked. No seriously, they have a very important job of keeping us safe across the web. They are constantly monitoring everything. They know when you are on amazon instead of finishing that TPS report and if you buy them lunch on friday then no one else has to know.

There you go folks, all of the roles you might encounter that are responsible for your company online presence. What was that, 18 roles? You might know some other roles or have different opinions. That is fine. Write your own post about it then.

At some companies, 1 person wears all of those hats. Can you believe that?

Been there, done that.

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