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The Elephant in the Room: Web design work is drying up

• kempe 11y ago
  To only know webdesign is a very limited focus.
• MuEta 11y ago
  It's reporting a 500 server error - does anyone have a mirror/archive?
  • Raphmedia 11y ago
    http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:I-YEMQ-tTagJ:www.sazzy.co.uk/the-elephant-in-the-room/&num=1&hl=en&gl=ca&strip=1&vwsrc=0 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:I-YEMQ-...
  • kylec 11y ago
    The server has dried up, too
• tomc1985 11y ago
  This is a byproduct of the massive increase in tooling that we've seen over the past few years. Granted tooling has always advanced incredibly quickly but I do feel that somewhere in the 2014-2016 time period we hit an inflection point.
  • blammail 11y ago
    This is definitely a factor. Its never been easier to do web design with many excellent tools. Similar thing has happened in game development (i.e. unity, et.al) - technology is bringing the expertise required lower.
    • id 11y ago
      Similarly high-skilled and specialized people will always be in demand.
  • chipsy 11y ago
    I really feel like the web today - the turnover, the frameworks, The Cloud, the burying of old under new - is the automation trend working faster and harder than ever. It all works better for the 80% case than an individual doing it from scratch - so we all succumb to it. And that's always been true of technology, but it used to be at the behest of a big platform owner like an MS or Sun or Apple. They set the marching orders and developers hopped on the bandwagon. You redid everything for the new platform. But with the Web, the genie is truly out of the bottle and nobody can put it back in. It's the same shitty platform as ever, with more and more kludges added on. So we look to automation for a silver bullet, and by sheer force of numbers we've succeeded in building something that Just Works most of the time and requires deep technical skills to fix otherwise.
• sp332 11y ago
  Freelance worked before because companies needed smallish jobs done here and there. Now they need a full-time team. Shouldn't that be better for the web designers? They don't have to be on a treadmill looking for leads all the time. They can settle in and work at one company with a high level of job security. And probably they'd have much more clout in terms of how things are done in the companies, driving bigger changes and potentially earning a lot more.
  • Rumudiez 11y ago
    It would seem that way, but high profile (or high ego) designers look down on working "in-house," as maintaining a single brand image over the course of years becomes incredibly tedious after even just a few months. Creatives thrive on variety; imagine if you had to implement a JSON parser everyday and weren't allowed to fundamentally change your approach after the very first one you make.
  • BjoernKW 11y ago
    Not necessarily. Depends on what your goals are. I'm a freelance IT consultant and I love it, especially the part about about finding leads and working for many different clients on new and interesting challenges. If freelance work dried up in my segment, I'd look for other entrepreneurial opportunities, which could very well mean not working in software development or IT anymore, but I certainly wouldn't settle for working as an employee. It just isn't for me. Besides, the high level of job security is a fallacy. As an employee you're working for only one client: Your employer. If that employer suddenly decides you're redundant you're out of a steady income at once with no other clients or leads to compensate for that. You can't exactly always be on the lookout for another position while on a job because your current employer will get suspicious and ask you what you think you're doing. For an entrepreneur always to be looking for new leads is the default mode so losing a deal - while unfortunate - isn't an end-of-the-line scenario in most cases.
    • richardwhiuk 11y ago
      In some places, e.g. the UK, full time employment gives you certain benefits - it's not as straight forward as contract where work where you can be let go at will. Also, I wouldn't expect looking for another job to have such harsh penalties as you seem to be suggesting.
• xhrpost 11y ago
  Am I missing something? My employer is having a hard time filling a single developer position. We have 100 million people within a 10 hour drive and we've posted to HN and SO. We're not an elite startup paying tons of money with stock options, but if there is no work like the author says, it shouldn't be that hard. I have recruiters messaging me about jobs thousands of miles away. I talk to other developers in the area and they confirm the same problem. I like the audio feature here by the way, I can listen while working, pretty awesome.
  • nix0n 11y ago
    The author means design work specifically.
    • dang 11y ago
      Ok, we changed the title from "work has dried up" to "web design work is drying up". If someone can suggest a better (more accurate and neutral) description of the article, we can change this.
      • jonesb6 11y ago
        "demand for traditional web design is decreasing"? There is still plenty of demand for design work, but its moved to user interface and experience design. The change is mostly trivial but it reflects a more mature mind set when it comes to user acquisition and retention. But I suppose scaring people into thinking they're losing their jobs will get more eyeballs.
  • noam87 11y ago
    > I like the audio feature here by the way, I can listen while working, pretty awesome. Yeah, great idea! I might start doing this myself for my own blog.
  • ochoseis 11y ago
    Regarding audio, I agree and think this is an awesome way to make content more accessible/ARIA-friendly. You can't reasonably expect every page on the web to have a spoken version, but if I maintained a blog I'd be willing to narrate my posts. Screen readers can fill in the gaps elsewhere.
• zwischenzug 11y ago
  bootstrap?
  • jraines 11y ago
    I guess this got downvoted due to brevity, but I would guess this is contributing, along with Wordpress themes. Not on the level of e.g. Squarespace, but definitely a factor. For a while every site I looked at having to do with bitcoin looked to be a Bootstrap site.
• quxbar 11y ago
  There just isn't a market for mediocre websites as a craft anymore - clients need social media profiles plus a squarespace, and then they're done.
• cjcenizal 11y ago
  I think there's a fundamental shift in the type of web-skills which are now in demand, due to a number of factors. Here's some things which come to mind: - A "web designer" or "web developer" used to be a generalist who wrote HTML, CSS, and some jQuery. Now there's a demand for specialization: a UI/UX designer who can prototype, iterate quickly, and use real data if possible, and a UI/UX engineer who can develop large-scale apps with an eye towards security, performance, reusability, and maintainability. - The need for the generalist web designer/developer seems supplanted by tools like Squarespace and Bootstrap, which make it easy to get acceptable results with fewer skills. It's the "commoditization of design". - The need for specialized designers/engineers is spurred by a realization that good design can command a premium/competitive advantage (and that good design means iterating quickly and having a deep understanding of what makes fundamentally good UI and UX), and that the front-end benefits from sound engineering practices as much as the back-end, especially if you're building SPAs or large-scale apps with complex UXes. - A lot of the design problems have been solved already. Questions such as when modals are appropriate, how to design forms effectively, what makes a good call-to-action, and how to structure IA effectively have been answered. Companies no longer need teams of people to work out answers to these questions, just one or two good leaders to evangelize the answers that are already established, and a team of UI engineers that can execute them well.
  • eitally 11y ago
    I agree 100%. What this also means is that, because of these micro-domain specializations, unless a founder has either a lot of time or a lot of money, what they end up building is (usually, if the market opportunity is in the multi-billions) an advanced functional prototype wealthier companies can look at as bellwether to judge the scalable profitability they could generate through acquisition. There's still enormous space for web-based SMBs, but that's not what most people think of when they think "startup."
    • theseatoms 11y ago
      Pardon my ignorance. What's an SMB?
• pbnjay 11y ago
  There's a lot more competition externally too, which doesn't help any. Everyone with a computer and "an eye for it" has entered the market and underbids the experienced players. Similar things are happening in Photography where everyone buys a nice DSLR and then thinks they can do weddings. When the new freelancers realize they aren't cut out for it, they just take a job at a bigco again (filling the same role of course), and new inexperienced freelancers come up the ranks to replace them. This seems to be the new world we live in - the "gig economy" means there are a lot of gigs but a lot more competition from less-experienced players.
  • Grazester 11y ago
    Surprisingly on my little Caribbean island a lot more people are picking up DSLR's and shooting wedding very well. My jaw dropped to see some of their work...then again they seem to really take this thing a lot more seriously than I did. I have an acquaintance that flies into the US to do work for clients there.
    • ghaff 11y ago
      It's another example of the hollowed out middle that was mentioned upthread. It's much easier than it used to be for someone with a modicum of talent and interest to take an SLR and produce competent photos of weddings and events--and to set themselves up online to run a small weekend side business. Some will be better than others certainly. And we can probably stipulate that most won't be as good as someone who does this as a full-time profession. But, guess what. They're in a position to earn some extra spending money on weekends while undercutting anyone who has to make a living at it. And many will produce results that are quite competent. Competence at a relatively low price is good value for a lot of young couples without much money. (I shot a couple weddings myself when I was in school--back in the film days.) Then on the other end you've got photographers with distinctive styles who deliver something special. They'll often be in great demand and command large premiums.
      • TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
        Thing is, a lot of professional photographers were truly lacking either talent or clue. They'd have a studio - a room with lights and a handful of backgrounds - in a town or village somewhere, and they'd get most of the portrait, wedding, and yearbook work for an area. Sometimes they'd get work from a local paper. But their output was average at best. They got work because they spent money on equipment, and they had enough basic competence to use it without making really obvious mistakes. But that was literally all they offered. >And many will produce results that are quite competent. Which is the core of the issue: it turns out that the basic creative skill level of much of the population is much higher than anyone realised. There's still a huge gap between dabblers and geniuses. But if you make professional equipment cheap and easy to use, you'll find that a lot of people can produce results that used to be considered professional. This is true of photography, music, video, and digital art - and now it's becoming true of programming. In a way this is a good thing. But it means real experts with truly outstanding skills are going to find it harder to find a niche that pays well - just as many outstanding musicians, photographers, and video makers are struggling because the market for innovative and slightly difficult work is smaller than it used to be. Web design + programming are going the same way. Industrial web dev - giant systems that work at scale and which deal with huge data sets - is still valuable for now. But small-scale freelance web dev is losing to automation and simplified design tools. It's not the same as the photography/creative market, because the big industrial conglomerates still want talent, and so do start-ups that hope to become big industrial conglomerates. But that basic level of mom 'n pop boutique "agency" design is going to die off completely within 5-10 years.
• FreedomToCreate 11y ago
  There is a lot of work. You are just looking for the wrong type.
  • josefresco 11y ago
    And they're at a conference! Conferences are luxuries for those looking to network, expand their skills and re-ignite passion. While some sales are made, conference goers should be hitting the pavement looking or new work, not complaining that no big business will hire them freelance anymore.
  • sarahparmenter 11y ago
    There is, but it appears to be harder than ever for newbies to get hold of it.
    • whorleater 11y ago
      Isn't that because that entire area of work (Wordpress blogs/basic websites/basic webfronts/etc) has been supplanted by Squarespace and all? Web documentation and tools have also gotten vastly better in the past few years, thereby allowing more people to get into the web industry, which then leads to a glut of supply while demand remains the same. I can hammer out a semi-functional webapp in a weekend now with backend in Meteor with a UI in React, whereas if I wanted to do this ~5 years ago I probably would've been stuck writing my own UI on top of Rails. Your article frames it as a bad thing, and I'm not sure it is a bad thing, it just means that demand has shifted to higher, more specialized web developers.
    • swah 11y ago
      I'm not a newbie, more like a generalist working in a isolated industry that I want to leave, and your article made me fear for my future :( But I'm very pessimistic..
• ideonexus 11y ago
  > On the stage, a very adept and confident speaker jokingly mentioned a web-related joke that feels decades old (which she was sarcastically referring to as being decades old) and the whole room fell about laughing; it was the first time they had heard this reference. It's really killing me to not know what the joke being referenced is. Never before have I so desperately wanted an author to "Show, don't tell." > We used to have to sell the benefits of being online to our clients. I remember when it was like this. In 1999 I was trying to drum up business for a web-development startup, going business-to-business offering cheap packages to get online. I got laughed out of a lot of shops and offices before I finally couldn't take the rejection anymore. > It didn’t seem to matter who I spoke to last year, similar stories of hiring internally rather than using external agencies/freelancers, cropped up – and thus, a significant new breed of web designer was born. Companies who would have once used small studios or freelancers to complete their projects, no longer had a need to use them and work started to dry up for people who had relied on the abundant freelance lifestyle that was once afforded to them. I think the author is making a mistake in focusing on this one reason for freelance web development work drying up. Large companies who need dedicated constantly-updated websites moved in-house, but the reality is that it doesn't take as much skill to setup a robust website anymore. My sister is a graphics designer with zero technical skills, she makes her freelance money with one-click wordpress installs and lets the customers manage their own sites. Then there's the next generation of kids who are simply naturals at this stuff. They don't know how to code, but there are so many WYSIWYG applications out there to build what they want, they don't need to do any coding. Even my 75-year-old mother setup and administers a wordpress blog for her students. Our skills made us special as innovators 10-20 years ago, but many of us are no longer cutting edge. Maybe some of these freelancers should look at becoming the in-house code-monkey for one of these larger companies if they are really hard-up for work.
  • sarahparmenter 11y ago
    Sorry to have frustrated you. The joke was http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/ http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/
    • 11y ago
• josefresco 11y ago
  One of the problems here is that the author is using his/her experience at "conferences" and stories from former "big business" employees to judge the volume of available work. Not only is that evidence anecdotal, but also comes from a very specific/narrow audience. I'm not going to say "conference goers" are inferior or bad at their jobs, just that there's a whole lot of web designers and developers who never attend conferences and therefore aren't included in his polling. There's also a lot of us (myself included) doing a lot of web design work for small businesses too small to hire in house. Even when our clients hire someone in-house to handle the web, it results in more work for us.
  • sarahparmenter 11y ago
    I'm not just using my evidence of anecdotal "conference goers" I have 6 months worth of email to back it up as well. Non-conference goers. People who are just trying to make a living and wondering why they can't.
    • nodefortytwo 11y ago
      That maybe true but those who have work won't be emailing asking for help. You are still only sampling a skewed group. We use freelancers a lot to supliment our inhouse skillset which I think is the industry standard
      • sarahparmenter 11y ago
        Totally industry standard. I've been one of such freelancers in the past. If we were going to boil this down to a scientific dip sample, then yes - I'm sampling a skewed group. Since we don't have any means of doing this, I'm simply writing about my experience of what I'm hearing across, what I would consider, a broad spectrum of our industry. Judging by my inbox of relieved freelancers/industry professionals today, my post is resonating with a whole subset of people who have been quietly suffering thinking there is something wrong with what they're doing/their work; when it's how the industry does business now, that's changed.
• Daishiman 11y ago
  No shit. Bottom-tier design work was necessary when the default templates for everything were crap and people were ignorant of the technology. Also, a lot of "designers" and "design agencies" can't code HTML worth crap and the value they provided was minimal. To me, a good independent designer codes, knows quirks, and also has the eye for design. If you're a larger company and you want the specialists, it's just better to hire them. And if you don't understand the importance of design, there's an unlimited amount of cheap, quality templates out there. The trivial work for Photoshoppers with a design degree is up.
  • frostirosti 11y ago
    I personally don't buy this argument. It's the same argument that a writing code in a higher level language. Once we have this HLL we don't need as many programmers because the language does all the heavy lifting. But what we've seen is a shift into different kinds of work. People adapt and get different skills.
    • Daishiman 11y ago
      But coder output is definitely higher now than ten years ago. And a lot of the work that's out there is of a much lower level of complexity, so the experts now are either working on things which need the requisite knowledge or working in places where their productivity is correctly compensated. The thing is that a few years ago people were willing to pay designers to make Photoshop templates and that's it. Nowadays this simply won't do, so the work is moving up in complexity and the bottom tier is being handled by people with no specific training. Finally, just because the work has shifted one way in coding jobs doesn't mean it will work that way in design. It is quite possible that the intermediate knowledge gap being created by better tools and more complex work just won't require people in that area, so we'll have both more experts and more newbies.
  • Neputys 11y ago
    I'd add one more thing - if you look at it closer, web designers never tried or managed to be properly original and diverse. There was always some sort of "magical guidelines" that made everything look in essence the same. Everyone was/is copying everyone else and getting paid for it. I think this has to end sooner or later and template popularity is one of the signs that real value of things is being better recognized.
• dantiberian 11y ago
  As an independent consultant/software developer, I'm deeply sympathetic to the author and freelance web communities issues. However it seems like the issue here is not that web design work is drying up, it's that web design work for freelancers is drying up. If all of the companies that used to contract out to freelancers now want permanent employees, then that's probably where you're going to need to go.
• strommen 11y ago
  A major trend in the past few years has been an increasing focus on conversion optimization. Companies no longer care quite so much about their website being beautiful; they care about whether it's helping their business. Indeed that's what they have always wanted - but 5 years ago they didn't realize they could measure that directly, and aesthetics seemed like the best proxy. I, for one, blame patio11.
  • rstupek 11y ago
    I'm not sure people don't care about aesthetics. Every website I've seen is one massive image with infinite scroll. I don't think that yields the best conversion optimization but maybe that's just me
    • ktRolster 11y ago
      > very website I've seen is one massive image with > infinite scroll. I don't think that yields the > best conversion optimization I've wondered that a lot, looking at some company's website, barely understanding what the product is, and asking myself, "Have they ever made a single sale or generated a single lead based on this website? What exactly is the purpose of this website?"
    • cubano 11y ago
      Geez...I'd be happy if those were the types I most often worked on. I'm still stuck with clients who think web design and conversion-based II are still living in 2008, with 980px box layouts and hideous bg-images.
• duren 11y ago
  I've done a bit of freelance web design and development over the past few years, but recently I've found myself referring more and more people to services like Squarespace and Shopify. As potential clients are given more options – especially cheaper ones – of course the industry is going to become more competitive.
  • sarahparmenter 11y ago
    They're good options too. I use Squarespace for one of my businesses because it needs to be updated by non-web-savvy people and it was the easiest route for that particular business.
    • duren 11y ago
      Sure, and the customer that wants a website and $25/month website is not typically going to be an ideal client for me.
    • ghaff 11y ago
      Squarespace seems to have really carved out a nice little niche for themselves. They've also really gone all in on podcast advertising. I'd be curious if/why there is some particular audience for podcasts that particularly aligns with Squarespace's product.
      • thirdsun 11y ago
        I hear their ads constantly on This American Life, Radiolab, Serial....or simply high quality general interest podcasts covering a wide range of subjects. I'm just guessing here, but I imagine the typical audience might be people that are educated, interested, curious, with good taste, somewhat close to the pulse of time, without necessarily falling into hipster territory, ...and not afraid of trying to build a website on their own (I'm guessing that's how they see using Squarespace), whether for their small business or their personal blog for niche interests. Sure, a very general and possibly very wrong assumption on my part, but I think it makes sense to target those listeners.
• michaelbuckbee 11y ago
  There has been one really significant general ecosystem change in the "web design" space: much higher quality HTML themes. I think these have just obliterated the low end of the market as for $50 and a little developer elbow grease you can have a very professional looking site. These are displacing web design jobs that would otherwise be in the $3k to $15k range and often times are better quality (tons of built in templates for different page types, retina ready, responsive, etc.) and no need for PSD2HTML work.
  • charlesdm 11y ago
    Some of the people who sell a $50 theme have made millions from them. So overall for those willing to take a risk, things are actually better than before.
• alexashka 11y ago
  What I find interesting is the call to action at the end: "Our power has always been in our web community – we are exceptionally good at creating movements and solving things, as a community. It’s time to dig deep and put as much time and effort into helping our community as we once did fixing browser quirks all those years ago." I think this is a common wishful thinking comment from people who don't understand how the world works. How is the 'community' of web designers going to do anything about companies wanting in-house staff or squarespace making week-long wordpress projects obsolete? Bottom line is: most people don't need a website. Squarespace covers a great deal of what very small websites need and frankly - a facebook page is good enough for most things. Why have a website at all? I don't know if selling t-shirts is a solved problem in web dev because I'm not in the loop but that seems to me - the last frontier, once you can sell t-shirts and other variety of items without needing much technical know-how, the game is over. I am glad it's over - who needs a billion bloated wordpress sites? I want everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news posted to a single platform (I use an RSS reader which makes dozens of websites look exactly the same). We don't need much web design, 100 different types of cars or 100 different shampoos, wake up, it's madness :)
  • enraged_camel 11y ago
    >>I am glad it's over - who needs a billion bloated wordpress sites? I want everything online sold through amazon, events posted on facebook and news posted to a single platform (I use an RSS reader which makes dozens of websites look exactly the same). Really? You want a few private players on the market controlling all interactions and commerce through their closed-source platforms?
    • pjlegato 11y ago
      It's already happened. Whether we want it or not is now beside the point. Sure, there will always be a few specialist sites, but the vast majority of commerce and interaction for most people has long since moved to Amazon and Facebook.
      • 11y ago
• Bjorkbat 11y ago
  Honestly, I'm pretty okay with this. The city where I live (which I imagine is indicative of other cities as well) the local population of freelancers and small studios forms a pyramid. The top half of the pyramid is made up of really phenomenal freelancers and small teams. Individually, they have pretty cool industry experience and have learned a lot from their careers, to the point where they have the negotiating power to operate as a well-payed contractor. As for the small studios, if they really wanted to they could use their in-house skills to create really amazing products and make money that way, but the personalities of the people who work there are more aligned with work where they can work on a multitude of exciting things at any different time. The bottom half of the pyramid has some people who are in a transitional state, who will eventually move to the top half, but it's mostly made of a lot of mediocre generalists. They saw that a lot of businesses just wanted a damn website, they figured out they could make that damn website, they figured out they could potentially make a lot of money this way, so they learned the basics of the LAMP stack, learned how to use Wordpress, and threw themselves into a crowded ring. To be fair, I've met a few of the bottom-halfers, and they seem like alright guys, but talking shop with them is pretty awful. They're not really life-long learners, or they have this unbalanced focus towards business and marketing with the idea that they can communicate the value of what they can do better, but not really looking into actually delivering more value through better skills. To sum it up, the top-halfers move with the changing market, the bottom-halfers just sort of sit there and wonder why more small businesses don't want custom Wordpress sites. I realize this can seem callous and harsh, but at the same time I've also seen the bottom half of the pyramid screw over small businesses on the regular. The don't explicitly brag about it, but they kinda do on an implicit level, and it's sad for the small business and it's sad that the person bragging has this weird sense of value exchange. Besides that, it's not like life ends of these freelancers either. So long as they're humble about the fact that they need to learn new skills, they can probably use their experience to get a pretty great job. It probably won't pay as much, but it's still going to pay pretty well. If they can't accept this, then I don't know if I can sympathize.
  • pekk 11y ago
    Sometimes I wonder if anyone has ever posted to HN not believing they are in the top 50%, 10%, or 1%. It's like how everyone's kid is above average. The topic of how everyone else sucks seems to be evergreen. Everyone's just trying to get by. If someone gets less work, that isn't reason to think that they have poor skills, or are screwing over small businesses.
• adamredwoods 11y ago
  Web design goes in-house when there's a need for more than just "web design". It's now a total design package, from web to social to print. Agencies are still fighting for that work. There's an ebb & flow in every industry.
• alkonaut 11y ago
  Really what he's saying isn't that web design work is drying up, it's that freelance or external contractor web design work is drying up because more work is being done in house. That doesn't sound like its bad in any way. > put as much time and effort into helping our community What is this community? The community of web designers? Aren't the in-house web designers at Toyota or Google still part of this same community?
• Theodores 11y ago
  This is good news to those of us that detest the way web design agencies work. These web design agencies only have themselves to blame. Far too often web design agencies see the finish line as the site going live. Actually, that is just the start. These web design agencies also under-bid and under-deliver, leaving the client at a loss for support. Even if they wanted support the web design agency are already on their next under-bid job that has to be churned out with no consideration of building a maintainable site. The other failure is the way these web design agencies work. Up until relatively recently all I was seeing was some PDF printouts drawn by some kid that learned how to do CMYK stuff vaguely in Photoshop at some second-rate educational facility. To hell with mobile, accessibility and all those things. Why use content when you can obliterate your clients copy with 'lorem boring ipsum' everywhere and totally ignore having engaging content that actually fits the boxes. Why have a homepage that can be easily updated by the client to suit their business needs to be always fresh when you can bake in something that looks pretty but doesn't have anything to do with the underlying information architecture of the client's copy? Typically these web design agencies also have micro managers on full time staff to then hire and fire developers to deliver the deliverables. These developers are always treated like mushrooms - kept in the dark - and what they deliver has to be a kludge. For instance, the kid armed with Photoshop that has put together the 'lorem ipsum' PDFs that the client has signed off on knows nothing of real design (how it works) so page headings float about all over the place from page to page, often with bespoke kerning that kind of insults the reader and the font designer. Therefore, frontend developer has no choice but to have about 432 lines of CSS just for H1 tags once the CSS has been compiled. There could be just the one H1 style for the whole site but the design process makes that totally impossible. These web design agencies with their micro-managers also play a game of Chinese Whispers. You know the deal - conference calls which take as long to get started as the actual meeting lasts, with everyone on the call except the guys doing the work. This then gets briefed down to the actual web developers with some drip feed that means the guys doing the actual work don't get to build something that has a 'systems approach' to it, instead everything is a kludge. For people that know nothing of 'git' I hope that there is absolutely no work for them, they should never have been wasting clients time in the first place, forever selling them snake oil and half baked 'solutions'. For those of us that do use ye-olde-version-control the future is as bright and busy now as it ever has been. My inbox is always full with people begging me to work for them. Too many companies have evolved from a normal business to a web business where all kinds of departments use the web for their actual needs. The website is core to their business and not some 'must have' add on that some daft agency has put together for them. Good on them for bringing talent on from in-house, these folk understand the business, the customers and the internal stake holders needs. This is what we do want to see, not this Chinese Whispers games with so-called web agencies that have useless micro-managers and totally undervalue genuine talent. I may sound a bit over-generalising but I have worked on both sides of the table, in-house and with these useless 'award winning' agencies. As well as these web design agencies I also hope these SEO companies die a quick death. Hours can be wasted with these folk agonising over links that nobody cares about, with them adding on turgid tracking stats javascript rubbish that doesn't deliver.
• learc83 11y ago
  Web design work hasn't really dried up, they just call themselves UI/UX designers now. And they work on designing and prototyping applications instead of building brochureware sites for small businesses. The skills required are a bit different because technology has changed. Web designers are like photographers. Camera technology advanced so that anyone can now be a mediocre photographer, just like anyone can now be a mediocre web designer. Until recently the technology (for both photographers and web designers) was difficult enough to use, that just knowing how to use it was a valuable skill. But, software is still eating the world, and it won't be done doing that for long while. All that software still needs people who are experts in human machine interaction--UI/UX designers. On another note, I think that companies having easier access to VC money may have encouraged some of them to hire full time designers where they used to use short term contractors.
• xutopia 11y ago
  Jobs get folded into other jobs all the time in the tech sector. Does anyone remember webmasters? They're the ones who would configure the web servers and host the files for you, set you up with FTP credentials etc... Now devops people fill the bill and so do most web developers I know but it's just a subset of what they do.
• Polindo 11y ago
  The times are a changing o..O
• colmvp 11y ago
  One web design agency I used to work for in the U.S. has exploded in growth. When I first started, they were a few dozen people. Now they have hundreds of employees and offices around the world. Many of these employees left to start their own web design agency and all have again, grown in size and worked on very notable design projects. While sites like Squarespace has made it easier for small and independent businesses to develop sites, medium to large businesses still don't mind going to agencies or firms. Agencies have the capacity to do other things like do professional photo shoots, influence branding, and give strategic consultation that DIY simply doesn't allow. I do think there is an evolution to the web design position. Now, on top of understanding aesthetics, designers need to know how to prototype, code (basics), interpret and apply human research.
• deleted 11y ago
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• jackgavigan 11y ago
  In the early days of the web, web designer used to earn as much as £800 per day (~$1200 at the time) for handcrafting HTML in vi or Notepad, doing a bit of image manipulation in Paint Shop Pro. Then Hotmetal Pro came along and we all had up learn the Dark Art of CGI scripting to maintain the daily rates. Then Cold Fusion took over, et cetera, et cetera. Skills are constantly rendered redundant by technology and/or commoditised because they get taught in mainstream education. You have to keep upgrading your skills.
  • stray 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure there are people with driving licenses who weren't born the last time I heard HoTMetaL mentioned.
    • jackgavigan 11y ago
      I'm pretty sure there are people with children who weren't born the last time I heard HoTmEtAl mentioned...
  • pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    But whilst a single wainwright could perhaps make a decent enough waggon a single individual can't produce a car. On the web the expectation has grown, the tech has matured, the simplest offerings now are beyond what can be efficiently created by a solo artisan. Yes you have to keep upgrading you skills but the skillset has grown - for me - so much that I can no longer be a full stack web dev without spending all my time just on keeping up with changes. One used to just need to know LAMP, but now there's nginx, postgres, ruby, ..., two main CSS preprocessors, several js frameworks, bootstrap, WordPress, ..., source management, coding standards, more browsers, more platforms, more focus on accessibility, more legal requirements, more payment gateways, more security issues, ..., social media interactions, expectations of greater integration with other communication platforms, ... There might still be a few wainwrights around the world but now there are while teams just to design the surface interface for the wheels. This is what web design is going.
  • cableshaft 11y ago
• dwd 11y ago
  All things have cycles. While you could argue Wix, Weekly and Squarespace are taking market share - there has always been that low end. Anyone remember Geocities? Envato is also taking a certain market though they are often the tire kickers who think they can do it themselves. You see a few of those who get so far but can't finish it. The instant their content doesn't match the length of the default content it starts to look bad or the template displays 4 key services, they have 5. What I find infuriating is the freelancers (or displaced marketing people) who just sell templates and even their own site is just an off-the-shelf template. The SEO space is similarly flooded with marketing people who can run SEMRush to get a report and spam your client base daily with long tail keyword suggestions they could get them ranking number one for. There is a new type of customer who want something custom and vehemently don't what a template as well. The big thing is mobile compatibility is still hard and hosting/security is hard. New browsers break stuff and many corporate clients still need it to look passable on XP. Customer Service is key and building a loyal customer base who you look after, will weather you through any slight change in the market.
  • fredleblanc 11y ago
    Good points all around. As a small web shop, and I'm currently overflowingly busy, as I have been for the last few years. It's probably partially luck, but I'd like to think that there a certain value that I, as a web person, brings to the table that makes it worthwhile for my clients. And let's not forget that while everyone may not want a custom design for their sites, there are a lot of people out there that don't want to maintain their own sites, and would rather pay someone else to do so. When that happens, what's the difference between building something custom vs. WordPress and a nice theme vs. SquareSpace and their offerings? The value isn't the deliverable as much as it's the comfort in knowing your web stuff is taken care of and you don't have to deal with it. I suppose at that point you're not talking about "web design" per se, but a "small web business." But I'm OK with that. Additionally, there is still room with those options to provide value more than just set-up and maintain. Writing good content and creating good IA is still a challenge for all of those products. To me, all of these things are part of being a small web shop, and from what I can see are things that won't be going away or automated any time soon. Although the once automated, we'll essentially have robots (creating content) fighting robots (search engine spiders), which I think is something we can all agree on as being fun to watch with a drink in hand.
• fiatjaf 11y ago
  That's great.
• kaishiro 11y ago
  I find this fascinating actually. Just the other day I ended up talking about this with my lawyer. I met with him for a consult on some LLC/Corp setup and mentioned how I had originally ended up on LegalZoom before contacting him. I said something to the effect of "You must hate them". He thought about it for a minute and then said how he honestly didn't think about them much at all. It was a completely different industry as far as he was concerned. He was in the business of offering problems to solutions whereas LegalZoom was offering a product. Whether you agree with that or not (I'm not qualified enough to make that distinction in the legal field), it really resonated with me. If you were to ask me if - as a freelance developer - I hated Wix or Squarespace, my response would be that I honestly don't think about them much at all. I'm actually largely ambivalent about them. I freelance full time and I've never been busier than I am right now. I would chalk some of that up to dumb luck, most of that up to good referrals, but at least a portion of that up to the fact that I don't provide a product for a client. I (try) to provide solutions to their business problems.
  • girvo 11y ago
    I love Wix and Squarespace. They're perfect for the super-cheap clients that usually end up sucking up far more attention than their bill would imply. Now we send those types of clients to Squarespace, and focus on a smaller group of much higher value clients. No more churn and burn.
  • ddlatham 11y ago
    He was in the business of offering problems to solutions Yup, sounds like some lawyers I talk to.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • DaveWalk 11y ago
    Thanks for sharing your lawyer analogy -- I think it's instructive. There are many freelance-style industries out there, and several must have gone through similar boom/bust periods. It would be instructive to learn from them. Your last sentence is also very wise: good referrals and providing solutions are the keys to success. Interestingly, they're also two major factors in the sales process.
• odonnellryan 11y ago
  I don't think this is true at all. There's a million new jobs online every day. There are a few problems I've realized about the industry: 1) Far too many clients are going with talent that will leave them in a bad place in the project. Usually this is to save a few thousand dollars now: a very modest $5,000 proposal gets shot down for "someone that can do it for a few hundred dollars." 2) Good clients, really good clients, are hard to find. This is because they're probably working with good developers. All the amazing clients I've found have been because their current dev is not able to handle the work for whatever reason and I got lucky to pick them up. The business is there, but it's repeat business. Stop looking for one-off work. Start building real relationships with your clients.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• nfriedly 11y ago
  Having spent several years freelancing and now on my second stint as an employee, I have to say: giving up freelancing and becoming an employee is not the end of the world. Sure you don't work with as wide of a variety of people and projects, but it is still possible to work from home and have a fair amount of autonomy. Plus you can get paid vacation, sane hours, and reliable pay. It's also generally less stressful.
• ryanSrich 11y ago
  It's all about positioning. The term "web designer" and "web developer" feels dated. If you have those skills you might consider rebranding yourself as a UI/UX Designer, a Product Designer or a Visual Designer. If you're good at JavaScript you could rebrand as a JavaScript Engineer, UI Engineer, or Frontend Developer. I think what it boils down to is that companies just want 1-5 in house designers to do the work that they typically outsourced in the past. If your product is particularly complex that number will grow (with scale as well of course). It's also worth noting that designers in the tech industry have, for better or worse, absorbed much of the tasks typically assigned to a frontend or web developer. Regardless of the prefix, if you're a designer you'll need solid HTMl/CSS/JS skills. Lastly. If you're looking for the freedom of freelance with the security of a full-time job I can't recommend remote work enough.
• adnrw 11y ago
  I think that like in most industries, the low-end has become commoditised. Want to sell stuff online? It used to cost thousands of dollars to get an online store up and running. Now you can sign up to Shopify and start selling your stuff the same day using a theme that, to be honest, is more than good enough for what it costs. The same goes for brochure sites, a space now filled by Squarespace and Wix and so on. Cheap or free options have always been around, but now you can get a theme that is more than good enough. But that's great for web designers, right? Anyone wanting to only pay $25/month for that kind of product is going to be a terrible client for anyone trying to make a proper living in the space. Work for web designers isn't drying up overall, it's just that the low-end – the work we didn't want to really do anyway – has become commoditised. The higher-end work – the more challenging problems to solve, the ones that need proper design thinking to solve – is still around, and it's become much more specialised.
  • pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    >Work for web designers isn't drying up overall, it's just that the low-end – [...] – has become commoditised. >The higher-end work – [...] – is still around, and it's become much more specialised The specialisation means that work for "web designers" has declined IMO. I used to do sites for local charities and SMEs. They tend now to use Wix or WordPress with a template, something along those lines. Those who can afford something more bespoke have much greater expectations and web design as a field has grown. Just keeping up with the pace of change of browser tech is hard now, never mind everything else that goes in to a "simple" webpage - one needs a team to do it properly IMO. So the generalists, as I once was, are really not in demand anymore. The web designer has been killed off by commoditisation and specialisation and there increased expectation and possibilities that are now part of the everyday web.
    • adnrw 11y ago
      > The specialisation means that work for "web designers" has declined IMO. Yep, exactly. There isn't really such thing as a "web designer" anymore (or rather, there isn't going to be). The job has been split into several different specialised roles. It's no longer enough to just be able to design and build a good website, because that level of service has become commoditised.
• hartator 11y ago
  I wonder what's the initial joke.
• jonesb6 11y ago
  A) the bar is being raised B) the bar is being raised particularly high where you are looking for work PHP, Jquery, etc. won't get you as far as it used to in the Bay Area. But as an exercise look for job openings in the mid-west or north-west, and they're looking for... PHP, Jquery, (ASP.net), etc. Markets move.. including the market for tech skills. You either move with the market or move markets. You shouldn't ever expect it to last forever.
• RawInfoSec 11y ago
  I think there's actually more web sites being built than ever, and that the problem is that company's expect more for less. The WordPress pollution has brought about a revolution in pricing within our field. Companies actually expect full e-commerce for under $1k because they've been spoiled with these easy-peasy systems that can be slapped together in no time at all. How do I market a team of high end devs, engineers and security consultans to develop a company web presence which Joe Nobody is offering them for $599? Here lies the elephant. Not the folks turning quick bucks at our expense, but the mere fact that it's darned near impossible to convince clients to spend wisely. There are still companies who know better, but in a world where everyone wants to be a 'startup', it's becoming less and less.
• spectrum1234 11y ago
  I was assuming this was about how the easier design aspects are becoming more standardized and available as code. I think this is really what the issue is and she completely missed it.
• bigger_cheese 11y ago
  How much has social media and mobile affected things. I'd imagine having a good social media presence and an iphone app would be seen as more important then the website for a lot of companies nowadays. Can you transfer web design skills to app design?
• jondubois 11y ago
  Weebly, Wix, Yola, etc... People can make their own websites now - They don't need web developers. Some bigger firms with more advanced requirements might still need web developers but 90% of websites don't require that much skill anymore. I think the entire software development profession is under threat. I think in the not-so-distant future, there will be drag-and-drop UI tools for businesses to build their own application frontends and they will hook them up into various plug-and-play backend services for a monthly fee (without hosting their own servers). The only software developers/engineers remaining will be the ones working for backend service (e.g. BaaS) providers - The others will be designers.
  • swah 11y ago
    And why wouldn't there be competition in the drag-and-drop UI tool space?
• dredmorbius 11y ago
  I followed the link to the article to read it. And then I did what I usually do these days: I hit the "Reader Mode" icon on my Firefox (Android) browser. I do the same for most desktop sites as well. Why? Font too small. Contrast too low. Line lengths too long. I get a better, and far more importantly, uniform experience when I bin all Web design and go with a built-in default page presentation mode. Oh, and that on a Web designer's own blog. Where, I presume, she doesn't have the problem of getting idiotic client requests which violate numerous sane design concepts. I've been saying this for some years now: Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. It's going to be solved, is being solved, in the browser, by: 1. Stripping out extraneous crud. I haven't mentioned my all-but-blind friend's difficulties in navigating anything on a computer, but extraneous crud and Shit That Randomly Changes (even the Firefox card previews on his browser start page) are huge hurdles. 2. Uniform presentation. 3. Metadata. 4. Curation. There was a post on HN recently about ePub. Quite frankly, an ePub based browsing / curation tool with uniform, sane, presentation would replace about 99.99964% of my Web browsing needs. There are a small number of missing factors from HTML, largely footnotes, equations support, and hierarchical comments/follow-ups. But add those and we can ditch the entire current mess for 1) ePub articles and 2) Web-deployed apps for the very small handful of sites which honestly need them.
  • busterarm 11y ago
    On that note, why don't our browsers render Markdown natively? Without extension. Just pick a markdown renderer and say 'screw you' to everyone else. I would serve up all of my static content as Markdown _tomorrow_ if that happened.
    • dredmorbius 11y ago
      Well, there's a markup language aimed at hypertext documents, oddly enough. It's called hyper text markup language.... Markdown is a good start at an authoring lanaguage, and it's lightweight. It's not complete of itself, though. I'd actually lean strongly toward LaTeX. What ePub does is to take HTML and reduce it to a decent set. Ultimately, I think that it, or some alternate set of basic document templates are pretty much what we want: 1. Index / landing page. Essentially a directory. 2. Article page. 3. Gallery page. A set of thumbnails or other items displayed, many to a page (10, 25, 100, 1,000, ...). 4. Discussion. That's ye olde threaded / flat set of comments on some topic, with or without an article. Possibly a few other bits. Anyone who's worked with a reasonably robust CMS (Wordpress, Drupal, Mediawiki, etc.) probably has a pretty good sense of what these might be. The real challenge is that there's nobody to whack you upside the head for posting utterly gobshite HTML on your own site. This is a place where, as much as I dislike major search engines laying down the law, I'd like them to do so. Strongly encourage well-formed Web sites and pages, and, especially, to provide a bonus for high-reputation authorship, which would require both metadata (author field) and if possible, support for signing major payload (textual content, individual images or multimedia if possible). Perhaps a few other bits....
• LargeCompanies 11y ago
  My strong point is that I am a UI/UX Designer who uses code to design; design and code .. get feedback.. reiterate once or twice and boom your site is done. One thing I lack is strong JS skills and I'm sure if I don't ramp them up it's going to hurt me in the next few years.
• datashovel 11y ago
  This reminds me. I've been wanting to ask (In fact I'm about to post a "Ask HN" about this in case anyone wants to have a discussion about it). Similar to "Who is hiring", I am wondering if a monthly "Who is networking" would be a good idea. Or does something like this already happen here? I'm thinking in terms of skilled people who are looking for other skilled people (with a different / complementary skillset) to collaborate on a side project. I'm doing just fine for myself as far as my career is concerned, but at this point I'm convinced startup life is in my blood so I am going to continue looking for that fix even if it's only to dedicate a few hours a week. With all the news about VCs tightening their budgets, I imagine folks may want to start considering spreading their tentacles into many different side projects to see if anyone out there would be a solid partner.
• ypeterholmes 11y ago
  The issue here boils down to process. Turn-key solutions like Wix have sprung up to cater the low hanging fruit. For everything else, the diversification of our digital lives across web and mobile devices have forced new interactive constraints on the traditional graphic design process, meaning its print media process foundations are no longer workable. Rather, the modern design process has to be much more agile and interactive than a flat design file can allow. The result is that we now have programmers trying to design, and designers trying to program. But it's a short term problem, because design software with interactive and adaptive tools are being constructed to help designers accommodate the new constraints and allow them back into the process.
• Swannie 11y ago
  This is more or less the direct rise of "digitisation". Companies now realise that their online/mobile experience is no longer a "me too", but good customer experience is a powerful differentiator in market. Freelance will go away. High value consulting will not. If you're not helping the average Digital Director in solving their challenges (be they scaling, conversion rates, cross device compatibility, load times, security, cost of maintenance, uptime).
• zhte415 11y ago
  This is a bit meta, or not, as this is about web design. I love the audio feature, where she reads her article. And the presentation of it - i.e. how long it takes to listen to. Nice style. Very Lucy Kellaway, infact.
  • DomreiRoam 11y ago
    I like it a lot. As a non native speaker I liked to ear how to pronounce the words.
• dcgoss 11y ago
  The audio narration of the blog is a brilliant idea.
• LandoCalrissian 11y ago
  Not really a shock, evolve or die. I did a great deal of web design in my earlier years, but you have to keep up. I learned how to code, I learned databases, I learned system administration, learned the latest frameworks, I made sure I kept up my skill set. I ended up in UI/UX, but since it's such a young field the variance in quality is completely crazy. You will get people that are 100% designers that have no concept of what is required to implement their ideas, on the other hand you get middling coders that know nothing about design. It's pretty interesting to see. It was pretty clear where it was going 5-6 years ago. It's too easy to make a simple restaurant website, you have to bring far more to the table these days.
• the_watcher 11y ago
  I get that it's frustrating for freelancers who used to be able to make a nice living doing web work, but this just reads as someone complaining that their skills are no longer in such short supply.
• rwhitman 11y ago
  I came to this realization a few months ago that I had been riding for several years on the wave of retrofitting and then migrating the desktop-focused web to mobile devices. Once every business with deep pockets in my circle had sufficiently mobile-optimized their website, my services were becoming less and less urgent. I've been freelancing / consulting for 15 years, so having to re-skill or market myself differently is a periodic necessity. But generally I'm accustomed to making moves into other web-related areas. There's a new reality evolving that I'm not accustomed to dealing with. No growth in investment, no new bleeding-edge tech or hip design trend to sell to clients. The people who need web talent every day already have them in-house by now. The ones who don't, hook together SAAS products to get what they need done. I've become very skilled at hooking together SAAS products for online marketing use cases, but the more I do it the more I realize I'm slowing chipping away my clients' need for hiring designers / developers. The market is becoming increasingly saturated with competing talent, a lot of whom were sold General Assembly type training as an easy solution to low employment prospects, on top of experienced folks who are scratching their heads over the stagnation like I am. Really thinking it might even be time to jump ship into another business altogether. I feel bad for all the folks who are entering the market right now, must be so disappointing
• DyslexicAtheist 11y ago
  who moved my cheese? There is lots of opportunities now around Embedded Systems for web engineers due to the IoT (say what?). More precisely the "Web of Things" [1] (see also WoT W3 WG). I always considered the web my thing and only recently jumped (after long reluctance) onto this. There is a real get-go attitude in this domain and you can tell companies are willing to spend money on it which makes the same jobs less of an uphill struggle. Most web developers I know wouldn't touch anything embedded with a stick but this is really an interesting topic to get into. To explain why this is a good match consider that a lot of the fundamental skills stay same because it will essentially be built on the same concept of linkable data so you can take along all you know (e.g. REST, TCP/IP, JavaScript, NodeJS). Also look into these IoT counterparts: * JSON => JSON-LD [2] * HTTP => CoAP [3] If you like security there are massive challenges due to the real-life damage an exploit can cause (hacked insulin pumps, or vehicles etc.) but from skills pov again pretty much the same skills you can just carry across and apply them there. [1] http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/05/30/the-web-of-things-needs-your-support/ http://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2015/05/30/the-web-of-th... [2] http://json-ld.org/ http://json-ld.org/ [3] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc7252
• justsaysmthng 11y ago
  Intuitively I feel like this is true and it kind of makes sense. The same thing is (or will soon be) happening to mobile app developers. One of the reasons is that technology is getting better and more standard compliant - that means browsers, operating systems, servers/CMSes, etc. Compare laying out your content using flexbox with old-school CSS black magic which also worked on IE 6. It's beyond comparison! Then there is the "new blood" coming into the industry every year. Millions of young developers, with access to superior training materials/tutorials and libraries. These new people "dilute" the market and make it easier for businesses to hire full time web devs than look for freelancers. The third reason - and I don't like to say it because some people take this very emotionally, but it's the truth - is open source. Take jQuery and Bootstrap. Back in the day, people had to re-implement parts of these libraries inside their projects by hand with various degrees of success. This was both necessary and time consuming - time which could be billed to your client. This represented between 30% - 80% of the amount of work on a website. Now it is no longer necessary. I could continue with these examples and move on to the "backend" and so on, but you get the point. I think the trend will continue to accelerate and will envelop app developers, "back end" developers and most "generalist" developers. We have to face it - software is getting cheaper and a lot less "magical" than it used to be. To top it off, I could add another two letters to the cake - AI, which will eat the lunch of maybe half of the existing devs in the next decade or so.
• mtbcoder 11y ago
  I'm late to the conversation here, but I think the real elephant in the room is the short shelf life of the average independent contractor/freelancer/consultant. Unfortunately, and all too often on this site, the meme of the happy-go-lucky, working-on-a-beach independent contractor is paraded out and extolled as some wondrous opportunity that will net your average "web developer" enough riches and leisure time to live the dream lifestyle. In reality, this couldn't be further from the truth. Being an independent contractor means you are a business, full stop. You are the CEO, the marketer, the HR department and the worker. Like any other business, a few will make it, but most will fizzle out, go bankrupt or be replaced by ruthless competitors. Unless you are able to find and acquire those in-demand, niche skill sets or product offerings (of which "web design" and/or "web development" are no longer in this set), your business will suffer a significantly short shelf life, just as any other business.
• SFjulie1 11y ago
  All jobs are drying up in the IT world. And there is a recession. And our job paid at the hour is to make software that "mimicks" a perfect worker, a traditional knowledge, craftsmanship, science that will take our jobs later for the benefits of others, that are statistically as good as anyone, but over granted the benefits of others. Like Ricky the Tuft. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault07.html http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/perrault07.html IT transform 40 hours / week thanks to IP law in a rent that will last years. Not only we make robots that are quite good, but thanks to IP laws we force every one to buy these software hence we create virtual enslavement of knowledge and know how for the only merit of people who don't want disruptions. Those who already are the wealthiest (or close to). IT business model is just dystopic, it just is an abstract machine to create exclusive right on anything that can be coded without granting much of anything to either the one who coded or those who knew initially how to code it. And even when trying to propose other choices (like FOSS) the IP law make it easy for companies to just use our software and through the game of IP either use them to inspire new software for which we don't neither see the money nor get granted free use, or plainly inspire themselves to make patents. /me quits this coding in these conditions.
• HoppedUpMenace 11y ago
  So basically the web design work that anyone could do with little to no training now has to be done by people with degrees and a deep understanding for how the web operates and that can adapt to shifting web design paradigms without significant retooling of skills.