A PROFESSION IS BORN\Webmasters bring on new sites, keep old ones running.

Byline: Yardena Arar Daily News Staff Writer

Eric Pan does it to make money while completing law school. Robert McDaniel does it full time for a Time-Warner subsidiary. Daniel Aharanoff's company does it on a contractual basis for a number of clients.

They're all Webmasters, and five years ago their jobs didn't exist. But with the explosive growth of the World Wide Web - and literally thousands of pages with the ubiquitous "Send questions or comments to webmasteryounameit.com" advisories - even the most casual of net surfers has by now bumped into the term.

What is a Webmaster? Broadly defined, it's anybody responsible for a Web page or site, which covers everything from the hobbyist who learns enough HTML (hypertext markup language, the coding that makes a document readable by a Web browser) to create his own home page, to the highly paid computer whiz supervising a corporate site with hundreds of pages.

"In our Internet training courses we teach people how to develop Web pages, and at the end of the course we say 'Congratulations You're a Webmaster,' " said Aharanoff, president of Infolink Communications, an Encino firm that in addition to Internet instruction offers Web consulting services.

But to be paid, a Webmaster must bring a few more skills to the table, including a knack for graphic design, working knowledge of new Web programming languages and the technical know-how to keep a site running smoothly.

Compensation for Webmasters varies as widely as job responsibilities. In a recent discussion on a USENET news group frequented by Webmasters, participants reported making as little as $15 an hour.

But Aharonoff said Webmasters who develop sites can command $50 an hour or more. And salaried Webmasters can expect to make $30,000 a year or more, again depending on the skills required.

In a recent Web Week magazine survey of Webmasters employed by Fortune 500 companies, two thirds reported making more than $45,000, and 37.5 percent said they made more than $65,000.

Tim Berners-Lee, director of the World Wide Web Consortium at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Laboratory for Computer Science, says he coined the term a few years ago in a document about the duties of the individual in charge of a Web server, the computer home of a Web site.

"You should make a mail alias 'Webmaster' on the server machine so that people who have problems with your server can e-mail you about it easily. This is similar to the 'postmaster' alias for people who have mail problems with your server," Berners-Lee writes. The document, called "Etiquette for Server Administrators," is now part of an on-line style guide (http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/Provider/Style/ Etiquette.html) developed by the W3 Consortium, a group of businesses and academic institutions that work with similar organizations overseas to develop common standards for the Web.

Robert McDaniel, Webmaster at Time Warner's Palace Group in Burbank, said his profession is so new that there's no organized course of study for it. Even now, while HTML and some other Web languages are being taught in schools, new ones like Java and VRML (virtual reality markup language) are being developed so quickly that the only way to learn them is on line or from books.

McDaniel, 25, started out as a programmer after graduating from UCLA as an applied mathematics major with a specialization in computing. The first Web site he worked on was at Marshall Industries in El Monte, an electronics component distributor that used its Web site primarily to disseminate information on its products.

The Palace Group, part of the Warner Music Group, has developed software that allows people to interact in a graphical user interface on the Internet, and the purpose of its 60-page Web site is to promote and distribute the software.

McDaniel says the first part of a Webmaster's job is to get a site up and running. "That usually entails creating the documents in HTML and putting them on a Web server. . . . After that, typically you handle maintenance of the site, monitoring it, updating links and updating pages."

At some sites, McDaniel said, a Webmaster's responsibilities are primarily technical; at others, they have a more significant role in content development.

"It depends on how empowered the Webmaster is to make changes," McDaniel said. "There are some businesses that have a very stringent approval policy - a lot of the executives want to be involved in what's on the site."

Pan, 24, said he puts in 20 to 30 hours a week at his part-time job at ORA Electronics of Chatsworth while attending law school at the University of La Verne. His responsibilities include administering the Web server, creating some pages and supervising pages created by others at the company.

Pan's undergraduate degree is in marketing; he picked up his computing and Web skills as a longtime hobbyist.

"I basically got on the bandwagon before everybody else. I've been playing with this since two or three years before it hit the market," said Pan, who intends to practice some aspect of law involving technology.

The 30-odd pages at ORA's site (http://www.orausa.com) basically provide information on the company's products; right now there's little interactivity. By way of contrast, Walt Disney Co.'s newly redesigned site (http://www.disney.com), which officially opens Thursday, has 2,500 pages offering everything from multimedia down-loads to interactive games.

Randy Dragon, Disney's director of network services, will be supervising three Webmasters.

"In our context, the Webmaster is very much sort of at the hub of this spoked wheel of work flow," Dragon said.

Webmasters at Disney are not involved in content development, which is handled either by third parties or in-house. Rather, the Disney Webmasters have to make sure that content moves smoothly between teams responsible for integrating it into the site and checking for quality assurance.

"The job is skewed on the side of coordination and management," Dragon said.

Once content has passed muster, the Webmasters are the only ones authorized to release it to Disney's Web servers.

Other Webmaster duties at Disney include troubleshooting and analyzing how new content will affect the site's computer resources - an important part of ensuring a site's smooth functioning. If there's not enough memory to support user demand, for example, a lot of pint-sized net surfers may be disappointed.

"These guys have to be at the keyboard, constantly," Dragon said, noting that a single area of Disney's huge site can have dozens of pages and hundreds of files, some of which will require daily updates.

"A lot of the change we have to manage is incremental change. The Webmaster has intimate knowledge of how each site is organized and linked together."

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Photo (1--Color) Robert McDaniel, Webmaster for Time Warner's Palace Group, began as a computer programmer. Bob Halvorsen/Daily News (2) Computer hobbyist Eric Pan works part-time as a Webmaster at ORA Electronics while attending law school at the University of La Verne. David Crane/Daily News (3) ORA Electronics' Web site gives information on the firm's products. (4) This Web site promotes the Palace Group's interactive software.