Although role modeling is a topic that has been treated over years in the object-oriented community, its use in the life cycle of Web Engineering, and particularly in object-oriented web design methods, has been seldom discussed and used yet. In this paper, we introduce roles in the modeling and design armory of existing Web engineering methods and show how it improves their expressive power and help to solve design problems that appear frequently in web applications. We first survey the state of the art of web engineering modeling approaches. A simple example is used to point out some situations in classic web engineering modeling where it is not possible to express that objects or nodes should change their properties (attributes or behaviors) according to the collaborating subject (the objects which send them messages or the nodes which are linked to them). Next, we introduce the object-oriented role concept and discuss how it has been used so far in the software engineering community and how it can be useful for web engineering modeling. Existing methods (like UWE and OOHDM) are used as an example to show how to introduce roles during the web engineering process. We compare our approach with others and conclude with some further research we are pursuing.