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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 Geocitie

by 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.

by dwd 11y ago

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.