[thelist] Webmastering Advice?

[John.Brooking at sappi.com]

Hello, everyone,

   My manager just told me they were thinking about having me take on the
role of webmaster over all of our North American locations, which we don't
currently have. This is good news for me, but - I'm not sure exactly what
that will entail, and what are the various skills I should be boning up on.
So I thought I'd ask you all for some advice.
   
   Here's more background on me. I'm a programmer at heart, and also by most
of my 15 years of experience. Most of it until the late '90s was RDBMS,
especially Oracle and MS platforms like VB/JET, also with some C and C++.
I'm largely self-taught at web development: HTML, JavaScript, CSS, and Perl.
I've had classes in Java and XML technologies, but not a lot of actual
experience in those. I've been "webmaster" for a couple of non-profits
hosted by ISP's (and on one AOL), but I put that in quotes because I realize
that in those contexts that basically means just the authoring side, since
the ISP is handling most of the techical administrative details. I suspect
that my biggest lack of experience for true corporate webmastering will be
in the areas of administration and security.
   
   And here's some business context (I don't think I'm revealing any trade
secrets here): My company is an international paper manufacturer, with about
a dozen mills worldwide. There are 4 mills here in North America, plus sales
locations and the North American corporate headquarters. Most of our
standard software worldwide is Microsoft (except Oracle DB, plus more and
more SAP). So we're talking Windows servers, IIS with ASP and (eventually,
but not yet) .Net. Most of our internet and intranet sites are hosted here
at Corporate IT, although some of the mills have their own intranets that
they host themselves. With the current business climate being what it is, a
number of site IT personnel have been cut, and there are currently no
official webmasters in the entire North American organization. Servers,
security, and network administration are already handled by other teams here
in Corporate, but it isn't centered around a central webmaster-type person.
It is likely that as webmaster I would still continue to work closely with
these other teams, since they have the expertise in each area. So I
definitely wouldn't be making all the decisions myself.
   
   So given my background and my company's structure, can anyone recommend
particular reading I should do, sites I should visit, classes I should take,
etc.? Maybe a list of topics I should research? Any advice is welcome.
Thanks in advance.
   
- John
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