What is a web master? Depending on whom you talk to depends on what definition you will get of "What is a Web Master". So after careful research throughout the World Wide Web, which only makes sense since I am defining web master, I have come to this conclusion. A Web Master is an individual who compiles a persons or corporations idea of what they are. By this I mean a Web Master must be able to envision what a person or company is trying to say about itself or product. So in a way a Web Master is a number of people, an editor, a layout and design specialist and a market research analyst.

Questy.com shares my opinion to some degree. Their site states that the Web Master is simply the person who manages the editorial content, overall development and operation of web site. So the Web Master is a writer, editor, artist, business manager, sales person, marketing person and trainer/instructor. To be all those people or accomplish all those tasks is however, unreasonable, especially for a large web site. So the Web Master must work with a number of people to maintain a web site.

Such is my circumstance, where I must work with the various students in the class to accomplish my project as Web Master. The other students are the writers of their project or topic. They are also the artists to a certain degree because they are the ones searching for the perfect artwork to compliment or tell their story. As the Web Master I must take twelve projects and come up with one theme that ties them all together. This means that as the chief editor I must look at the topics and determine what is the common denominator. Then I must have a vision quest as to what design layout will best tell our story. And finally how to package the final product so that others surfing the web will be pulled into our web sites.

I wondered how to make all this possible when I came across a checklist by Mitchell Harper in a “Diary of a Web Master.” In his article he stated that there are ten basic elements he considers each time he designs a web site. I will discuss his elements throughout this paper. The elements are:

• Select a color scheme and stick with it;
• Design for cross browser compatibility;
• Provide an intuitive, easy to use navigation system;
• Use cascading style sheets;
• Underline and color your hyper links;
• Optimize your images;
• Tell visitors who you are and what you do;
• Use customer testimonials; and
• Finally provide contact details on every page

To make things interesting you will find a series of questions on the following pages. The questions are based on the material "Web Master" and the answers can be found on the page following the question.