April 4 is an unofficial professional holiday – the Webmasters Day. The date of celebrations is chosen for a reason: at a closer look, one can notice that the date 4.04 reminds of Error 404 (Page not found) which directly related with the work of webmasters. Moreover, this date coincides with the International Internet Day. Aleksandr Sapozhnikov, Head of the Unit for Web-projects of the Department of Global Network Technologies of SUSU’s IT Department, told us about specificity of webmaster’s work, about professional knowledge and tendencies in the sphere of web development.
– What is the specificity of a webmaster’s work?
– Webmaster is a wide and unofficial definition which can include administrators, website developers, or web-designers. Usually, webmaster is a person who performs some operations with a website, but his specialization may differ. For example, developers are working with technical issues connected with functioning of a website; web-designers create external appearance of a website; besides, there are also content-managers who are responsible for filling a website’s content, and many other specialists. Moreover, even within this seemingly narrow specialization, there are even more narrow specialists: text editors, photographers, etc. There are specialists for user interface; they are working in the sphere of a user’s interactions with a website. This sphere is wide. Our Unit of Web-projects is a part of the Department of Global Network Technologies, which works with everything connected with websites and networks. And the most important site for us is the university’s website. In the frameworks of SUSU website I am first of all is responsible for technical issues: functioning of the website’s control system, its timely updating, fixing malfunctions, and expanding functionality.
– What knowledge one should possess in order to be a professional in the web sphere?
– Web development is the field which is comparatively easy to enter in. If 20 years ago, when I just started working in this sphere, it was completely new and fantastic, nowadays, as far as I know, even schoolchildren can develop websites. A website, from a user’s point of view, in its essence is a big text, which is specifically marked inside. In order to make first steps in this field, it is enough to find any web-page as a sample, save it to your computer, modify it, see what happens and keep learning. A website can be static, i.e. just a text with lining; but it may also have a dynamic part, i.e. react to a user’s actions. At the university’s website, there are dynamic parts at the side of both the server and the client. Necessary knowledge depends on the site that needs to be obtained in the end.
If one needs to create a website fast and with the use of current materials, one can manage without the knowledge of programming languages. Working in the web became easy to access; there are many control systems which allow independently install the system, adjust it and start using it.
Accessibility of working with the web appeared in the result of demand for quick publication of information at the Internet, and there are many services for that. Besides, there are services in the form of website constructors, where one has the possibility to construct a website out of template blocks without the knowledge of programming languages.
People who are blogging, for example, don’t have to write their own system for publishing a blog; they normally use finished services such as LiveJournal. Just like in the case with blogs, there are services for publishing other types of information, for example, music, images, or videos. But if one needs to create something unique, something that no one had before, then various knowledge is required: in programming, editing, data processing. As a result, despite the simplicity of entering, the sphere of web development allows a webmaster enhance his qualification in various areas, and in a perspective work on really difficult tasks.
– What tendencies in web design and website development are there today?
– Information technology in general and website development in particular is a very rapidly developing sphere. One of the tendencies noticeable in the last several years makes even the most inexperienced in web development visitors of websites aspire to make minimalistic, “flat” design. It is partly conditioned by popularity of mobile devices, because complex design of a website is hard to watch on the small screen of a phone. Therefore, development of minimalism in web design is a natural and logical sequence: the example of it is the “mobile first” concept assuming that the first one to develop should be a simple version of a website, accessible via mobile devices, and then it gets more complicated for adequate displaying on larger screens. The web has been existing for more than 30 years, and initially it was intended as a transmission medium, non-dependent on the output device.
Ideally, we should have the possibility to review a website using either computer or a phone and, let’s say, even print its content. During the last years we made sure that independence from the output device is important. By the example of the university’s website I can say that according to data of 2017, the share of users using mobile phones sometimes exceeds 50%. Of course we can’t ignore such big audience, so we adjust to them.