A friend of mine said that being a webmaster is basically changing pixs on the site upload/download. Is that true or is there more to do?

I think it depends on the site. It can be as simple as just maintaining a site, which could be images, text etc. Nowadays the smarter developers use some sort of content management system to allow clients some control of the more mundane tasks such as entering text and images, this frees them up to do other tasks such as redesign build and maintain databases and in alot of cases maintain the server.

So to answer your question I think the best definition of a webmaster is a general jack of all trades when it comes to the web. in the early 90's companies looked for webmasters because they could not justify spending the resources on an entire team to maintain websites. byt the late 90's some companies had 100s of people doing specific functions like: designers, copywriters, programmers, quality control and so on.

Now I think in some regards we are back to companies wanting jsut a few people that can perform many functions.

Sorry about the history lesson hope it helped.

Thank You J
My friend gave me the same info as you did about putting in pixs and text. which i have no problem uploading and downloading as i have used the web making tools on a freeweb space site and tripod, and am teaching myself dreamweaver. Should i wait till i know dreamweaver better to say i am web care taker?

It sounds like you are thinking about advertising yourself as a webmaster or web care take in order to get work? If that is the casse I think it depends on the job and how well you learn on your feet. Some of us do better under pressure and when we are in real world situations, while others would rather learn in a more academic setting before heading into the real world.

As for dreamweaver, I found I learned it faster by just doing projects in it but again it depends on the type of learner you are.

I am working on a web page (slowly lol) to show case my writing at the moment. I am putting up synopsis of a manuscript and am drawing up the characters to appear and disappear around it. But as i said it is going slowly. This is how i am teaching myself dreamweaver