The dot-com boom years saw many companies creating a presence on the Internet. Product brochures, company profiles, quarterly reports, and organizational charts found their way from filing cabinets and wall charts to web pages.
Who did all that work? A team of technical people in every organization was responsible for cranking out web pages as fast as their fingers could type and they gained the name of webmasters. It was a job that was popular when the Internet started. Webmasters were the resident gurus in hacking out scripts and HTML: in fact these skills are often prerequisites for the position.
As websites grew in importance and size, it came to the point where a single webmaster (or even a team of webmasters) was not able to cope with the large volume of information that needed to make its way online.
Content started to become unmanageable. While a single team of webmasters could manage the website in its infant stages, it was clear that either processes had to be changed or super-webmasters would have to be recruited to keep the site going as it grew.
Frustrated with being at the mercy of overworked webmasters, some content providers or authors took up the task of trying to publish their own content online. Without a proper content management system, this usually meant that authors had to take on the role of the webmaster and learn the dark art of web publishing. They went through boot camps that taught them how to use various web editing tools. Most authors did not have programming backgrounds. It was often a hair-tearing, time-consuming and difficult process.