I’ve worked as a web developer for quite sometime. In recent years I’ve considered myself more of a web contractor. These days it takes a number of specialized skills to develop a truly professional company website. As such I’ve found myself bringing together subcontractors as well as building complete sites from scratch.

Many people are building website mashups on their own these days. The same sort of thing happened to desktop publishing. When I started out with DP I was one of few that could actually do it. Then software kept making it easier and easier until secretaries could build beautiful layouts and finished products.

I started building sites using simple text editors and using a host of specialized tools to create graphics, animated graphics, color choosers, etc. These days I mostly use Microsoft Expressions Web 2.0 or Adobe DreamWeaver in CS3 to build sites from scratch. I also spend a lot of time in Adobe Photoshop. Lately I’ve been building sites from WordPress. I’ve used Blogger, Typepad, and others. Main reason for these in my mind is to be able to provide a simple content management system for my clients.

Once upon a time a “webmaster” could do it all, everything from the concept of a website all the way through the creation, and completion and maintenance.

Let’s see if we can rattle off a list of specialized skills needed these days to create any possibility of websites, from scratch:

• project manager
• copywriter
• copy editor
• graphic artist
• coders of any number of different languages aside from just plain html (asp, php, java, javascript,  . . . )
• database programer
• user interface designer
• Flash designer
• video creator
• audio creator
• and more