In this paper we discuss the use of the role concept in the Web Engi- neering life cycle. We claim that introducing roles in the modeling and design armory of existing web engineering methods will improve their expression power and help to solve design problems that appear frequently in Web Appli- cations. We first survey those situations in which objects must change their properties according to the context in which they are used; next we introduce the role concept and discuss how it has been used so far in the software engi- neering community. Using existing methods (like UWE and OOHDM) as an example we show how to introduce roles during the Web Engineering process. We compare our work with other similar approaches and then outline some fur- ther work we are pursuing.