First Ever Web Design Survey Results

rainhill writes "In April 2007, A List Apart and An Event Apart conducted a survey of people who make websites. Close to 33,000 web professionals answered the survey's 37 questions, providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development (PDF) as practiced in the US and worldwide. Among the findings: over 70% of people in this field earn less than $60K per year. There is little gender bias in salary. And over 70% of Web workers post to a blog; this number shows very little dropoff with age."

Comments

And they made a PDF...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sigh... at least it's not a giant image of text.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cute. Seriously though, I *do* really like web design and web technologies. But I can't make the plunge over cause every deal I make the people want something for nothing, and when I worked at a web design firm, it was an extra $100 bucks to make another page that matched the template and changed a little text. But you either gotta rip them off or do it for free, nothing in the middle that would benefit the designer and client. Very frustrating, also I would need someone to bounce ideas off of, or have one guy find the jobs and the other guy do the job, I get burned out doing both.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[fishdan]

Seriously! As soon as I saw it was a PDF -- posted to the web, I thought "AHA -- It's a poll of shitty web developers. That explains a lot."

And lot's not forget, it's not just a PDF -- it's a friggin' 84 page PDF. In tribute to this stupidity, I am going to follow it up by printing off copies and bringing them to my local /. anniversary party for everyone.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[ploafmaster general]

I never thought I'd say this, but R T F A. I know the post didn't link to the article itself, but I think we're all intelligent enough to go up a level or two in the URL to see the article itself.

Immediately below the download button you see:
"Findings From the Web Design Survey (1.6 MB PDF)"

I don't think 1.6 MB is too huge for us nerdy Slash-dotters with our high speed connections, especially when we've been warned. And I don't think any reader here can justify clicking the link without first knowing what file type it is.

Additional details about the PDF choice:
"Note: This PDF has been tagged for accessibility, however the graphics representing the complex charts do not yet have equivalents. An updated document will be available soon."

Anyway, they have the raw data available as well in multiple formats (with sizes indicated) so you can avoid charts if you want.

Sheesh.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[twistedsymphony]

bah... the could have used SVGs for the graphs... At least that's what all the cool web developers use.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[Anonymous Coward]

In my day, we used characters for charts:

Option 1: @@@@@
Option 2: @@@@@@@@@@@@
Option 3: @@

That's beautiful, and don't ask me to draw you a pie chart, because I will.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[br0d]

Current Mood: Underpaid Current Music: James Brown - It's a Man's World

Re:And they made a PDF...

[soliptic]

Eric Meyer (who I suppose might count as a "cool web developer") wrote about the choices/process behind producing the graphs.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[soliptic]

D'oh - I linked you to the wrong entry in the blog, sorry. (Although it is still on-topic, in that it's about this survey.) This is the one talking about the graphing.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[mstahl]

Interesting story: a while back on Craigslist in Chicago I saw a guy who wrote this ridiculous post to "gigs" that said—and I'm paraphrasing here—"I project that my company will be worth $300B in five years. I need an unpaid intern to do all of the technical work, since I don't know how to program." The response from the freelance community was fantastic, seriously. Tons of people posted response posts to his with photos of either their genitals or an extended middle finger in his direction. This kind of thing seriously happens all the time though, and it's the biggest danger for freelance web folks; you can't get involved in something where you're working for someone who thinks that web design isn't real work.

It's a serious problem. As a freelance web designer and developer, I usually find a lot of my jobs either through craigslist or the 37signals "gigs" board. I don't like full-time work or long-term work, so it's kind of hard but I usually end up finding more interesting things this way. Usually, if you find a short-term freelance job, they're looking for one of the following:

1. Someone who will do "expert" quality work, but they're only offering an intern's salary or hourly rate.
2. Someone who doesn't ask too many questions when offered a flat rate, and who will be contracted to finish the job for that flat rate no matter how many times the spec changes or how many hours he/she has to work.
3. Someone who will save their project at the very last minute, for which they will be paid a fabulous amount of money but will be run absolutely ragged in the process.

Needless to say, it's that last one that I usually try to go for, but I've experienced the others, too. My usual rate is pretty high, but that's because I feel like I'm worth that much to someone who needs me, and it also discourages people from talking to me if they don't know what they want or they're not serious about getting the job done. Don't go overboard though, 'cause then you just won't get any clients at all and people will generally think you're full of yourself.

The worst of all is the job postings where someone has a really great (they think) web site concept, but no business plan and no technical details whatsoever, and is looking for a team of people to somehow sort it out. Best to go looking at a site like 37signals that actually charges employers for the privilege of posting jobs there; tends to weed out a lot of the crackpots.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[fishdan]

The problem is not the charts, but the information itself. Although Google reads PDFs and puts them into it's index, PDF is fundamentally a printing format, and not easily searchable by a browser.

Having the raw data available is fine, but the raw fact is this -- they chose to not express this report in a web format, when it would have been trivial to do so. Also, they have the raw data available in ZIP files!!! Is there a browser out there that does not support gzip? (Well yes, of course, but the are such a small percentage, that I think the savings in zipping is negligible). Why not gzip on the server side? Why force me through one more step when I should be able to view the csv/tsv in my browser.

And this is the REAL problem with web design -- the premier web style instruction site is not interested in presenting information in a web format. They think it's more about design than it is about data accessibility. Here's my newsflash. If you can't find the data, the design is worthless. In the ideal world design COMPLEMENTS the data. I would not bother to complain, if this weren't purporting to be the premier web style site.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[Demonz (Sydney Web D]

I'm a junior web/designer developer from Sydney and I'd be stoked to be making $60,000 US a year.

Re:And they made a PDF...

[honor, not armor]

I'd like to see that, actually.

First ever?!

[sulli]

Nobody has done a survey of web designers since 1994? Bull-shit.

Re:First ever?!

[The_Crowder]

Yeah, the title of this headline is completely misleading. The Usability Professionals' Association has been surveying professionals for several years. Go to their homepage and under News is the results (pdf warning) for the 2005 survey. Are these two surveys different? Yes. My point is that the title of this headline is completely misleading.

Bias?

[kripkenstein]

There is little gender bias in salary. It would be better to say that there is little difference in salary; 'bias' has negative connotations of unfairness. As research in this area shows, it is hard to pinpoint which salary differences are actually discriminatory and which are not, but reflect objective factors (amount of hours worked, etc. etc.).

I don't mean to start an offtopic discussion, just wanted to point out that the choice of word there might bait people.

Re:Bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how you can be offended when the statement doesn't specify which gender has the lower salary.

Re:Bias?

[plague3106]

Well there's really no other explaination except bias, is there? Salary workers don't get paid overtime; even if some due, when asked what their salary is, they woudl give the amount excluding any salary, because overtime may or may not be there.

Given 100 people, half men, half women, I would expect that they have the same distribution of salaries.

Re:Bias?

[kripkenstein]

I wasn't offended, and everything I said is true regardless of which gender has the lower salary.

Re:Bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless of course the women were not as qualified or talented on average, because like it or not women and men are different. Whether these differences are cultural or genetic doesn't matter. Those don't reflect bias at all. Stop trying to see sexism behind every disparity.

Re:Bias?

[foobsr]

I don't mean to start an offtopic discussion

You may turn that into one that is completely on topic by mentioning that their use of the term 'bias' might shine a light on the overall quality of their research on the basis of a self-selecting sample, which they are not shy to advertise to give a 'true' picture, which again shows that they do no less than nothing about statistics based research. They don't even come to a conclusive result regarding the count of items their questionnaire might have, 36 or 37 (here http://www.alistapart.com/articles/webdesignsurvey — does not matter, just a fence-post error.

However, the meta-result to me is that they again expose themselves as half-educated and overhyped. Yes, I do not particularly like them, along with Dash, Pirillo, ... you name them.

CC.

Re:Bias?

[CraniumDesigns]

i would have like to see it broken up for part time freelancers and full timers like me. i think the part timers bring down the salary ranges significantly. i didn't see anything addressing the differences in salary between part time and full time. ranges in san francisco where i work are a bit higher than what i'm seeing there.

Re:Bias?

[Surt]

Salaried workers don't get paid overtime, but they get paid for overtime in the form of bonuses and salary raises that reflect on the perceived or real performance that results from extra hours worked.

If you have a man who works 50 hours, and a woman who works 40 hours all year, and the man is 10% more productive as a result of his 25% longer hours, which are you more likely to reward with a larger raise?

Re:Bias?

[NMerriam]

Given 100 people, half men, half women, I would expect that they have the same distribution of salaries.

Assuming salaries are fixed, yes. But most salaries are negotiable -- and it has been shown that women generally wind up with worse deals from negotiations than men do. Whether that is because of cultural issues (women taught not to be assertive, others thinking they can always talk a woman down and therefore pushing harder) or not is a totally separate question from whether actual bias exists in salary offers.

Re:Bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have a man who works 50 hours, and a woman who works 40 hours all year, and the man is 10% more productive as a result of his 25% longer hours, which are you more likely to reward with a larger raise?

I don't know what kind of company you work for, but my company doesn't reward you for having to work overtime. They say thanks for the free labor. And I work for a very, very, very large corporation.

Re:Bias?

[Surt]

How does that very large company decide who to promote?

I've only worked for small and medium size companies so far (< 1k employees). So I don't know how the big companies do it, but all the (5) companies i've worked for decided raises and promotions based on performance and networking, both of which you can do better if you work a few extra hours.

Re:Bias?

[plague3106]

Salaried workers don't get paid overtime, but they get paid for overtime in the form of bonuses and salary raises that reflect on the perceived or real performance that results from extra hours worked.

Which doesn't affect this survey in the slightest, because again, I would think you'd respond with your ACTUAL salary, not including bonuses and such.

If you have a man who works 50 hours, and a woman who works 40 hours all year, and the man is 10% more productive as a result of his 25% longer hours, which are you more likely to reward with a larger raise?

You act as if there's a solid metric to measure productivity. There's not, so your question is flawed right at the start.

Re:Bias?

[Surt]

I'm fairly sure that salary raises do in fact impact salary.

And for productivity, there are metrics in many areas. Web design may not be one, I don't know, I'm not in web design. Even if there are not precise measures, there may yet be ways that management can reasonably gauge performance (peer review, supervisor review, blind code review, etc).

Re:Bias?

[plague3106]

Raises do, yes. But again, unless there is some bias going on, women should get about the same amount in raises. Contrary to what some may think, women do work as hard and as long as men.

As for productivity, peer reviews don't measure how productive you are. What's a good measure? How many pages you can get done? How many graphics sliced? Those are no good, as you need quality as well. How do you quantify quality? How many times you are asked to redo a graphic?

Code reviews also don't point out how productive you are; they mearely measure quality of code.

Re:Bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

How does that very large company decide who to promote?

Large companies have a fast track executive program that makes you eligible for promotion. If you aren't in the program forget about it; you do better by applying for the title you want at a different company and going there. Then if you really like you former company, you apply for the position from outside. Large companies always like to hire from outside, but they expect the prospective employees to have experience in the business, and the industry. That is acquired by job-hopping.

Otherwise its 4% baby.

Re:Bias?

[Surt]

Thanks for responding. That fits well with what i've heard about big companies, and is one of the key reasons I've avoided working for them. I've had about 9% average annual raise over the last 14 years, and would put my resume out for a new job the day after I received a 4%.

Re:Bias?

[Surt]

While I'm sure women do work as hard, I'm fairly sure the statistics show they do not work as long.
Here's a couple of citations for that:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2007/jul/wk1/art01.htm
http://jada.ada.org/cgi/content/full/135/5/637 (specific to dentists)
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf06302/

I'm pretty sure there are a lot more, but there's some term for this I can't recall that would probably turn them up.

Re:Bias?

[myowntrueself]

It would be better to say that there is little difference in salary; 'bias' has negative connotations of unfairness.

Hello??

Gender bias in salary is, somehow, not unfair?

The '80s called. They want their bias back.

Re:Bias?

[kripkenstein]

Gender bias is unfair, of course. That question is, is the existing difference in average salary due to bias / discrimination, or other factors. The research community is divided on this issue, it is complex.

For example, women tend to work at more part-time positions, and part-time positions tend to get paid less per hour (workplaces prefer to hire full-time employees).

Re:Bias?

[Cowardly Anonym]

If you have a man who works 50 hours, and a woman who works 40 hours all year, and the man is 10% more productive as a result of his 25% longer hours, which are you more likely to reward with a larger raise?

The woman. If the man and woman normally produce 100 widgets in 40 hours, then they're each creating 2.5 widgets per hour. If the man works 50 hours (25% more hours) and creates 110 widgets (10% more productivity), then he's creating 2.2 widgets per hour. His productivity has gone DOWN.

Re:Bias?

[Surt]

That's an interesting point of view. Most employers are going to measure productivity in widgets per day/week/month/year rather than per hour. It is well established that productivity per hour does go down as hours increase (which was why I only claimed a 10% increase on 25% more hours). Most employers (I think) are going to reward the employee with the greater long term productivity.

Re:Bias?

[Arterion]

9% per year, four fourteen years?

That would mean if you started at $35k a year, you'd be making about $117k a year now. I find that a little hard to believe. If it is true, then congrats to you. You've found the American dream, seems like. :-)

Re:Bias?

[Surt]

I started at $33k, but otherwise you were right. But i'm now reasonably near the top of my pay scale, so my ability to keep that up is probably going to be limited.

Re:Bias?

[snoozaholic]

That depends on who's most likely to leave if they don't get a raise. :-)

Re:Bias?

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be a hourly employee. In the salaried world... If they each make $1,200 per week, the man produces at a cost of $10.91 per widget, while the woman produces at a cost of $12.00 per widget. This is what companies would look at.

Re:Bias?

[plague3106]

Skipping the link specific to dentists, since we're talking about women working in general, both of those studies state that women work less than one hour less than their male counter parts. Not really significant, since hours worked != productivity, or even that someone really is working (does /. count as work?).

Also, those studies are including people that work 35 hours or more a week; I've always been under the impression that 35 hours is still part-time, unless something has changed. I'd like to see the data for 40 hours or more, since all the graph shows is that there may be more women working 35 hour jobs than 40 hours.

Re:Bias?

[Uzuri]

Depends on where you're employed. Everyone here is on 35 hours and it's considered full time. We're a college.

Good design also has to look good

[pzs]

A few years ago, I worked for the head of a major University computer science department in the UK. I was in charge of building the web page for our research project. My boss told me "whatever you do, my main preference in all these things is that it hast to look good."

For inspiration, I visited the home-page of this arch aesthete. I discovered that his page, entirely in an overlarge Times font, used big thick-bordered frames (with scroll bars) a fantastically pixellated jpg of him and big flashing "new!" buttons next to various bits of the page.

Somehow, I managed not to laugh next time I discussed the page with him.

Re:Good design also has to look good

[Stamen]

Style is a subtle thing, very subtle. A lot of people, simply can't distinguish good from bad. Really awesome design looks like anyone could of created it in 5 minutes; which of course they can't, but that's the genius of it.

For me it's music, I don't hear in a very wide range (so say my hearing tests), and I exasperate my co-worker, who is an audiophile, because I simply can't hear the difference, like he can. The "horrible" pop music, with terrible range, sounds the same as "good" music to me.

Re:Good design also has to look good

[HartDev]

I am glad that the people who make scam web pages and garbage sites have no design sense and give themselves away quickly. THIS IS NOT A SCAM is the best indicator ever! Especially when it is in large, bold, blinking red text!

Re:Good design also has to look good

[Pingmaster]

Not surprising, I've come across alot of people who could tell you what looks good on a website, but lack either the technical or creative ability to produce it themselves.

Re:Good design also has to look good

[Yetihehe]

And a lot of people can't distinguish good and bad, but like me when it comes to design something, it WILL be bad even for them. Let's face it, most people can't design just like most people can't program (I think often it's only one of those two skills).

Re:Good design also has to look good

[brainproxy]

It makes sense that if he could not create a "stylish" page, he hired a professional web designer, (guessing you).

You should give him the benefit of the doubt. A lot of art critics are not, themselves, artists.

Sounds like he knew of this deficit an gave you the job.

Re:Good design also has to look good

[Stamen]

I think often it's only one of those two skills I completely disagree. I think most programmers just aren't interested in design and have spent all of 20 minutes, or less, thinking about it. If someone spent 20 minutes learning how to program, they'd hardly be any good at it.

What makes beautiful code --code that is simple yet complete, powerful yet flexible-- is the exact same things that makes beautiful design. I believe that "beauty" is an intrinsic truth of the universe; wether mathematical, musical, or visual. If you are creating, no matter what the creation, the same process applies in your quest to reach beauty.

Much if visual design is algorithmic. Very simply rules one can apply to anything they are laying out. Saying "I'm a programmer and not artistic" is just an excuse for laziness. The least artistic programmer in the world can learn some basic rules, and produce design that is 80% perfect. If they studied hard, they could do better than that, but 80% is a huge improvement over what most people create.

Re:Good design also has to look good

[Anonymous Coward]

The least artistic programmer in the world can learn some basic rules, and produce design that is 80% perfect. If they studied hard, they could do better than that,... I have to disagree.

Some people just lack the aesthetic ability. I mean geesh.... take a look at how your parents dress.

Re:Good design also has to look good

[Tim C]

As another poster pointed out, he most likely knew that he couldn't create the sort of look he wanted, which is precisely why he hired you.

For my part, I can do HTML, JS, CSS, etc; but I'm a programmer, not a designer. You want functional, I'm your man. You want stylish, good looking - go talk to someone else. I'll happily do the back end, and integrate the finished HTML page to make it function, but you'll be wanting someone else to do the artistic stuff.

Re:Good design also has to look good

[Riquez]

my main preference in all these things is that it hast to look good

& was this professor also a 12th Century bard?

Re:Good design also has to look good

[mini me]

But to be a good programmer, aesthetic ability is a requirement. The visual appearance of code is the most important factor in maintainability.

Re:Good design also has to look good

[Anonymous Coward]

"could've", or "could have", but certainly not "could of"

Surprised? Not really.

[Anonymous Coward]

~$60k/year or less sounds quite about right. Web design isn't rocket science.

People who don't suck at graphic design are a dime a dozen. People who can chop up a PSD and write valid XHTML are a dime a dozen. People who can apply cheap hacks to make it work in Internet Explorer are slightly more expensive at a quarter a dozen, but that's still damned cheap.

The real money's in development of all this fancy Web 2.0 Ajaxy crap, web-based services, et cetera. Bit more involved than mere 'web design'.

'sides, $60k/year might blow if you live in Silicon Valley. Elsewhere.. Well, hell, I don't make $60k/year, and I am as a King to the peasants of my area. ('course, I got out of web design; Paul H. Muad'dib, what boring and trivial work.)

Wrong survey

[Hatta]

A web design survey? I thought they were going to be asking web users how they felt about various web designs. That would be a survey I'd really like to see happen. Maybe us users could communicate to the designers exactly how we feel about their designs. Maybe they could ask how many web users like it when a website takes over the windowing functions your browser should be managing. If I want to open a link in a new window, I'll do it myself TYVM. Or maybe they could ask how users feel about being tied to flash based in browser media players, instead of getting an old fashioned .avi to download. This is the kind of web design survey we really need.

Re:Wrong survey

[gmacd]

Turn your pop up blocker off. You'll see that there are too many of these surveys out there already.

Now if you're looking for intelligent aggregation, summaries and publication of data from these surveys that is rarer.

Re:Wrong survey

[The Queen]

You're still assuming that the people who are PAYING for the websites to be built really care about (or have the capacity to understand) what the users would like. Even now, with all the research and data available for us designers to argue with for simplicity and usability, the folks who sign the check want what they want and as long as I need to pay rent, they'll get it.

That said, I've talked many, many clients out of building a site entirely in Flash - and they promptly found another designer.

Re:Wrong survey

[Kuvter]

As a newly graduated web designer, I completely agree. All I've seen so far is that some myspace pages are horrible and take forever to load, other sites where their navigation bars change based on the page, and other minor things here and there that aren't too happy. I'd assume you want a page to load quickly, be easy to navigate, and look good. However the look good part seems to be subjective. I've noticed a lot more sites are becoming static, instead of dynamic, because it's the easiest way to obtain cross browser support. But I'm a fan of the dynamic pages that fill the pages based on how big your window is. It'd be great to get an over all idea of what people like and dislike with site design.

Re:Wrong survey

[Womens Shoes]

A survey might not give accurate results because what people say they like is not always what they respond to. There's a pretty great presentation by Malcolm Gladwell about this.

For example, everyone says they dislike blue underlined links. But in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience there is no better way to let a user know where to click.

So I'd like to see the data you're looking for too... but I bet a test vs. a survey would yield very different results.

Re:Wrong survey

[Hatta]

I love blue underlined links.

Re:Wrong survey

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, but I don't suppose you've got a fancy title like "Front-end Ergonomics Guru" or "Streaming Media 2.0 Connoisseur", now do you? People that do know what works best for you, even better than you as a user do.

Re:Wrong survey

[Hatta]

I've noticed a lot more sites are becoming static, instead of dynamic, because it's the easiest way to obtain cross browser support.

What does server side dynamic pages (PHP, etc) have to do with cross browser support? You can dynamically generate the exact same content you host statically, it just takes more processing power on the server.

But I'm a fan of the dynamic pages that fill the pages based on how big your window is.

A proper web browser will reflow the text on any web page static or dynamic. In fact a web designer has to go out of their way to break that behavior by specifying the dimensions of their boxes in pixels.

Re:Wrong survey

[Bobb Sledd]

All right let me explain a few things about web design and what "customers" actually want.

Now I know and you know what users want as far as usability, and that's all fine and dandy. But I honestly don't care all that much about you as a user. I mean beyond the fact that I can reasonably be sure that you're seeing my page as I intended you to see it. See, you and your weird-browser-configurations don't pay my salary. My client does. And my client wants a web page that looks like a page from a magazine, and looks pretty much the same on 90% of the machines looking at it. They don't want me to spend a lot of time checking for web-safe colors, making sure everything is ISO compliant, that the code is W3C compliant, coding everything using CSS instead of tables... that crap doesn't generally make me money.

Understand that I am making a generalization.

So what's the problem? With a web page, you have statically-sized images in terms of pixels, but you have scalable text. Those two don't mix easily as far as format goes.

So I'm forced to make a decision: If the text is inherent to the design, then I'm going to make the text be an image; otherwise it is going to ruin the visual effect.

I can spend all day breaking up my design in Photoshop and trying to make everything so that when you resize the browser it stretches the content to fit. Great. But my client doesn't really care about that, and there's a point to what they are willing to pay for.

So am I going to spend all day doing that if I don't get another dime for it? Or am I going to make something that my customer is generally happy with and move on to get more projects?

Yeah. Most of this crap is like building sand-castles for a living anyway. Very temporary things.

Here's my suggestion to a partial solution: Let EVERYTHING be scalable. As a user, if I want to make the font bigger, fine--let it be bigger, but then make EVERY object bigger by the same factor.

Re:Wrong survey

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a professional interaction designer. I have a university education in HCI, I've been practicing since 2000, and for the past 5 years I've worked at a large software multinational as an interface designer. I work within a group of over a hundred designers and usability testers & have designed a very broad range of software.

The problem with user interface and experience is very rarely lack of talent from a trained designer. Honestly, making good design decisions is not terribly difficult; worse comes to worst, you follow the conventions and people will probably get what you're doing, even if it's not a very inspired design.

It's also not for a lack of surveys. The field of Human Computer Interaction knows a lot about how people behave with current technology, and there are lots of usability analysts / usability researchers / usability testers who continually provide good data about how people behave with any particular interface. Any good designer will tell you that they love working with a researcher, because it inspires good and usable design. Anyone who's trained in HCI takes it as a hippocratic oath of sorts: the software serves the people; you are not the user; and users are not dumb, they just have better things to do with their time than figure out YOUR stupid interface.

That's the theory, anyway. In many cases, when tortured designs have come out of my company, it's not because the designer was an idiot. It's because the VPs wanted this feature or that, or the product manager decided that if people can't figure it out they shouldn't use the site and we're not going to listen to the results of usability tests, or because a couple of the engineers couldn't be bothered to fix the UI bugs assigned to them. I'm not saying that bad designers don't exist, but the reason that bad design gets deployed often has a lot more to do with bad software process and a lack of caring about user experience than it has to do with lack of data or lack of design skill.

Re:Wrong survey

[Kuvter]

I've noticed a lot more sites are becoming static, instead of dynamic, because it's the easiest way to obtain cross browser support.

What does server side dynamic pages (PHP, etc) have to do with cross browser support? You can dynamically generate the exact same content you host statically, it just takes more processing power on the server. To clarify I meant static layouts, not static content. For example having the page 900 pixels wide, no matter what size the browser is. Examples of this cnn.com, walmart.com, bestbuy.com. These pages don't even fill the whole browser, except with white space or a repeated background, if you're past that static width.

But I'm a fan of the dynamic pages that fill the pages based on how big your window is.

A proper web browser will reflow the text on any web page static or dynamic. In fact a web designer has to go out of their way to break that behavior by specifying the dimensions of their boxes in pixels. This is true, but like I said I've seen a trend where companies are doing this static layout, because the dynamic way has potential to load differently across browsers. This brings us to the parent saying that this is the wrong survey. I'd like some more insight into this trend other than just my speculations.

Re:Wrong survey

[Hatta]

Now I know and you know what users want as far as usability, and that's all fine and dandy. But I honestly don't care all that much about you as a user.

Then you, and your client, won't care if I don't read your site. There are billions of sites on the internet, if you want my eyes on your site you better make it nice for me to use. Otherwise I'll go read your competitors site.

So what's the problem? With a web page, you have statically-sized images in terms of pixels, but you have scalable text. Those two don't mix easily as far as format goes.

Then use scalable vector graphics. Using raster graphics for page layout and icons is as backwards as using tables for layout.

Here's my suggestion to a partial solution: Let EVERYTHING be scalable. As a user, if I want to make the font bigger, fine--let it be bigger, but then make EVERY object bigger by the same factor.

Opera does this. It's not that great. If I zoom into a web page, I end up having to pan left and right in order to read it. The proper solution is for web pages to be designed to be device independent. We have all the tools we need, designers are just lazy, and as a user I suffer for it.

Re:Wrong survey

[Hatta]

To clarify I meant static layouts, not static content. For example having the page 900 pixels wide, no matter what size the browser is. Examples of this cnn.com, walmart.com, bestbuy.com. These pages don't even fill the whole browser, except with white space or a repeated background, if you're past that static width.

OK, I see what you mean. I hate those fixed width sites with a passion.

This is true, but like I said I've seen a trend where companies are doing this static layout, because the dynamic way has potential to load differently across browsers.

I'd say the fixed width sites are significantly more likely to break. Suppose I have a high resolution monitor. That makes my text too small to read. If I resize the fonts it makes the lines too long for the column and they end up getting covered by whatever is in the next column over. Or alternatively, the browser reflows the text and I end up with 4 or 5 words per column. Try reading that! With fixed width columns you can't even guarantee your page will display correctly in the same browser on the same platform with different screen resolutions. That's leaving alone cross-browser and cross-platform portability. It's just a fundamentally broken design.

Re:Wrong survey

[mstahl]

A lot of the stuff you're complaining about isn't really in the hands of web designers or developers. I will come clean, now, and confess that I have committed some of those sins you describe, but only at the urging of a client. And when the client's paying my bills, I do what they say, even if it feels a little dirty sometimes.

A couple of examples of bizarre client behaviour....

I once had a client (and I'm going to spare them the embarrassment of saying who they were; suffice it to say they're among the world's most recognizable companies with a trademark so recognizable that it's the second most universal word in any language—the number one being "okay") who said they wanted their website to have more red in it. Their reason? Because red downloads faster.

I once had a client who wanted their links underlined in dotted lines and as bright a colour as possible because they didn't think that my more sedated colour scheme properly communicated to the user that these were links. Also each link opened a new window.

I have still never had a client who wanted AVI files downloadable. Everyone wants something that will just play in the browser because, believe it or not, most users download a file and then immediately have no idea where it downloaded (yes, I know, it's mysterious, but this is my experience). They use flash because it's more prevalent than Quicktime or anything that plays AVI files. In the case of playing video in-browser flash is a compromise just like anything else would be. Since you're a power-user anyway just download the FLV files then play those using VLC. It works.

Re:Wrong survey

[Bobb Sledd]

if you want my eyes on your site you better make it nice for me to use.

A) You're right, we don't really care. I hate to say it, but if I can't grab your attention with slightly more than minimal programming effort... you aren't worth the effort. There are also billions of people on the 'net.

B) Are you not pointing out that format IS important to you?

Then use scalable vector graphics. Using raster graphics for page layout and icons is as backwards as using tables for layout.

Oh that's a ridiculous thing to say. And it's a cop-out. Most of the graphics are from photographs; they CAN'T be vectors. Besides, I'm not even sure how to use vector images with DreamWeaver anyway without rasterizing.

And tables worked just fine for layout, thank you very much. At least I had it figured out so that if I *did* want a page to be scalable... I could do so pretty easily. Now supposedly that method is predicated and everything must be done with CSS instead. Suuure. Nope. That ain't how it works.

If you do any advertising at all, and you want to pop out large volumes of pages with photos on them, then the fastest/easiest/best-looking way is to design your page with PhotoShop, slice the image up, export to DreamWeaver, and knock-out where you need the content to be. Add your forms/scripting and Boom I'm done. Pay me and both the client and me are happy.

Now what can I use to position things that easily with CSS?

You have to understand, when I make a layout, I'm making a picture (a jpeg) to show the client. That's what they review before I even write one single line of HTML. So the end result BETTER look like what we agreed on.

And furthermore, if I have a really cool font that I want on the page, CSS just don't cut it. Only way I know to practically do it is with Flash, and that has its own set of problems I try to avoid.

Now I'm ranting about a certain class of web pages. Yes, there are tons of web sites where graphical appeal comes way behind browser-compatibility and usability. Ecommerce and highly data-driven web sites, etc. I'm not talking about those.

I'm talking about the Mom'n'Pop $300 "web presence" special. I am simply not spending much time on those sites or they become unprofitable real quick.

Re:Wrong survey

[NulDevice]

This came up on another site, recetnly - the discussion was the relative advantages of "liquid" versus fixed layouts in the age of The Giant Monitor.

Surprisingly there were good points to be made on both sides - liquid designs don't always scan well to the human eye when they flow out across a maximized, high-res 24" widescreen monitor (or even a 17", sometimes) - you can often end up with one very long line of text and some enormous menu bar with 5 options.

The upshot was that there wasn't really a hard-and-fast rule, and that it should really be tailored to the kind of content you are trying to display.

All I can say is, at least the useless Flash Splash Screen is starting to die out.

Re:Wrong survey

[Hatta]

If your browser is too wide for it to reflow text and look nice, you can always resize the window so it does look nice. With a fixed width page you're just fucked if it doesn't look right. The web designer should always let the browser do its job.

Re:Wrong survey

[NulDevice]

I think the argument was once you start requiring user intervention in any form - expanding or contracting a window, for example - to make the page look good, then the design has essentially failed.

I don't know if I fully agree with that - the browser *should* be able to do its job...but sometimes how the browser does its job and the requirements of the content conflict.

Glad it's not a profession that I chose

[jonnyj]

I know the average age of the respondents is pretty young, but those salaries are shockingly low.

Re:Glad it's not a profession that I chose

[Anonymous Coward]

manage my music in iTunes (a annoying feat that takes lots of time, but I gotta do it to use it on my iPhone)

So you bought an iPhone in part for the convenience of taking your music anywhere, but that requires that you spend so much time organizing your music library that you have to do it at work, too?

Re:Glad it's not a profession that I chose

[nostriluu]

I know lots of people who are independent web developers, and they pick and choose their clients not for the high pay, but for interest in their field (non profits, politics, small business, etc). As well, as an independent you can write off a lot of your expenses, so $60k translates to much more. Finally, you get a lot more freedom, which sometimes leads to not working all the time.

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

...there are 33,000 web professionals.

I thought that, for many people, it was very much an "on the side" activity.

Re:In other news...

[HartDev]

yeah, that is what it has always been for me, though if four or five guys that do this got together, then you might be able to start a business...

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure, I thought so too, until I got hired at the #1 web development company in my city/region and make a decent wage doing that, with no post-high-school education. Worked out well for me, so far... ;) So much for the whole bullshit idea that you have to enslave yourself to the education system in order to survive (as teachers and schools always seemed to convey to students as I was growing up)...

Re:In other news...

[devjj]

Tell that to John Hicks.

Eh, what Front Page

[Anonymous Coward]

You can get more than $60K a year for that skill?

Re:Eh, what Front Page

[HartDev]

I think that for just a plain jane web page, no, and people who like frontpage have crap for code, and I have noticed that NVU keeps shuffling my code around. But I think that if you know XML, and to parse data to and from RSS feeds, blog and a slue of other online technologies or formats, you can make a lot of money......marketing, not webdesign. It is my opinion that some of the most functional and well like sites are not eye candy, but actually have a reason to be visited other then to give the creator of the site money from his obnoxious ads...(cough--myspace--cough).

Oblig. web design site.

[jackpot777]

I occasionally take a look at Web Pages That Suck to get a feel for what NOT to do.

In summary: don't be doing this. It's not big, and it's not clever.

Re:Oblig. web design site.

[darjen]

In summary: don't be doing this. It's not big, and it's not clever.

Holy crap, that is revolting.

Re:Oblig. web design site.

[deftcoder]

Holy crap.

That page is a GREAT example to use when showing how poorly Firefox is threaded. (or how shitty Gecko is, or both)

Re:Oblig. web design site.

[fishdan]

ok I'll bite, what does that show about FF threading model? Rendered in 5.13 secs on my gaming machine in FF 2.0.0.7 and 9 secs in IE7? I don't mean this as a slam -- if you've got knowledge, please dish.

Re:Oblig. web design site.

[monkeyboythom]

Holy crap.

It's the mother that spawned MySpace!

Re:Oblig. web design site.

[aquatone282]

In summary: don't be doing this.

I clicked on that link and all I can say is:

OWWWWWWWWWWWWW!

Re:Oblig. web design site.

[hobo sapiens]

hrodc.com, wow. I mean, that's so bad it's impressive. 2.75M page size! No wonder it takes forever to load. That's just as bad as hvysl.org but for entirely different reasons.

Re:Oblig. web design site.

[Stooshie]

... It's not big, and it's not clever ...

I agree it's not clever, but boy was it big!

Re:Oblig. web design site.

[alyawn]

In summary: don't be doing this. It's not big, and it's not clever.

You need to warn people w/ a NSFW. I practically fell out of my chair!

Re:Oblig. web design site.

[Curmudgeonlyoldbloke]

That's absolutely beyond belief...

Incredibly, they do offer web design courses:
http://www.hrodc.com/WEB.DESIGN.htm

(Surely it's a joke though? A standard page format, each one populated by "Eliza"?)

Re:Oblig. web design site.

[deftcoder]

Well, Firefox on Linux is a bit different.

While that page was loading, both cores were 100% utilized on this laptop. I couldn't click on any other tabs, and the Firefox window was ignoring input for a good 15 seconds straight.

Also, 2.0.0.7 is out of date. You should update!

I don't know what's scarier

[MeditationSensation]

That there are 33,000 web design "professionals" out there... or that they have enough downtime to fill out a silly survey. ;-)

Re:I don't know what's scarier

[HartDev]

Haha, it is funny cause I never got asked these questions! I made a really hard effort to become a freelance web designer, I scoured craigslist, have a site, sent e-mails and even just helped people out for free, I think if I get a loan, learn to code PHP, C/C++ and the like, I will be much better off, I must be doing it horribly wrong cause it is way to much work to just get a perspective client that "might" pay me.......that is scary!

About the wages

[Anonymous Coward]

The low wage made by most web designers is a product of supply and demand. The barriers to entry for web design are low. In other words, almost anyone can create a web page and call themselves a designer.

The sign industry went through the same problem when it computerized. Prior to computerization, signmakers had to have the skill to produce letters using a brush. After computerization, anybody could crank out vinyl letters quickly and cheaply. What the signmakers learned was that, if you wanted to make decent money, you actually had to be a good designer. People will pay good money for signs that work. IMHO, people will also pay good money for websites that work. Ah but there's the rub. WORK. For a sign, 'work' means that you get twice as many customers walking into your business. It probably means the same for a website.

To prosper, web designers should probably know a lot more about 'design' (design doesn't mean 'pretty' or 'eye candy') and they should know a lot more about marketing.

PS, to the major (radio, tv and print) advertising company whose website is very pretty but takes five minutes to load - you guys are clueless.

Re:About the wages

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed: it is rather low. The web firm that I worked for, hired teenagers and washed out mainframe programmers that picked up HTML and CSS, and they only paid us $12 an hour, but the PHP programmers made like $18/hr....yeah pretty low. I do a tech support job now and hardly do anything compared to when I was at the design firm and I get $18/hr here, and I can do homework and manage my music in iTunes (a annoying feat that takes lots of time, but I gotta do it to use it on my iPhone) I figured striking out on my own would make me a lot of money since I would charge less and do more, but it seems that unless you are in a firm they don't want to pay you at all!

Re:About the wages

[Bogtha]

IMHO, people will also pay good money for websites that work. Ah but there's the rub. WORK. For a sign, 'work' means that you get twice as many customers walking into your business. It probably means the same for a website.

Sadly, it does not. A person who knows nothing about sign-making can easily look at a sign and see whether it "works" or not. A person who knows nothing about web design can't look at a website and judge whether it "works" or not. Chances are they are using Internet Explorer. Does it fail in all other browsers? I wouldn't consider a website like that "working", but why would a person who isn't a web designer think to check in other browsers? Is it valid? Why would a non-professional know what validity is? What's the uptime like? Could a non-professional judge something like that? Is it accessible? Usable?

The real problem with the web design industry is that the people paying for websites can't usually judge ahead of time whether a person is a professional putting out high-quality work, or if they are a kid who is good at drawing pretty pictures. They only find out once the website goes live and they start getting complaints — and the usual response to that is to commission the unprofessional screw-up to do more paid work to fix it, when it shouldn't have been broken in the first place.

Re:About the wages

[ednopantz]

More important would be to control for hours worked. Annual salary is meaningless without reference to the number of hours it took to get there.

Re:About the wages

[mgabrys_sf]

re:"design doesn't mean 'pretty' or 'eye candy'"

To those who know design - no it doesn't. To the people that hire designers? Yes it does. Welcome to the real world. Here's a fun thing to do. Explain typography to them. The blank stares should be worth a lunchtime of laughs.

Bright and shiney shit sells. I'd love to do more - but I have this aversion to starving. Food - what a fucking luxury huh?

Re:About the wages

[Anonymous Coward]

What does managing music in itunes have to do with anything? For that matter, what's your point?

Includes the whole group?!

[CarpetShark]

This was a reasonably representative survey of all web designers? Bull-shit.

Re:Includes the whole group?!

[codeshack]

Probably it's not a bad sample. I don't trust any web designer that doesn't read A List Apart -- it's pretty much the creme de la web design sources, both in terms of style, technique, and best practices. My old boss used to mandate it.

And yes, I am a shill. But they have taught me many clever things, and turned me into a CSS Nazi to boot. And I filled out the survey way back when it started (feels like awhile).

Re:Includes the whole group?!

[Stooshie]

If you RTFS(urvey) it's a survey of a wide range of job types.

Re:Includes the whole group?!

[Stooshie]

In fact, just realised the title is "First Ever Web Design Survey Results", Not Web Designer

Re:Includes the whole group?!

[Lobster Quadrille]

Probably it's not a bad sample. I don't trust any web designer that doesn't read A List Apart At my company, there's a lot of designers who don't read A List Apart. There's also a lot of designers who are very bad at it. I wouldn't hire my company to design a web site.

My point is, this is not a representative sample. Maybe representative of the good designers, but definitely not of all designers.

Re:Includes the whole group?!

[McFadden]

There are a lot of bad designers, that still read A List Apart. Just like there are a lot of bad golfers, who follow Tiger Woods.

Re:Includes the whole group?!

[zantolak]

ALA is a great site. But that doesn't mean only polling people who are web designers and happen to visit the website while the survey is running is anywhere near a representative sample.

Re:Includes the whole group?!

[CarpetShark]

There's only one site worth mandating, and that's w3.org. Even then, they could simply download the standards, and refer to them locally. You don't have to be a sheep following some website to be a good designer or web developer.

Clue to "shockingly low" salaries

[Facetious]

...providing the first data ever collected on the business of web design and development (PDF) as practiced in the US and worldwide Were this study of US workers alone, then yes, it does seem low. However, there is likely some skew from India and India-like workers. No I did not RTFA.

What About IE?

[baomike]

They didn't ask how many designed web site that were usable only with IE.
and then why?

Low? 60k for web design?

[Shivetya]

Maybe if your in downtown New York but outside of that, sorry web design is not nearly as difficult as many make it out to be. Some of the cumbersome tools and even client requirements can make it work - but its not like writing the back end that serves these pages or runs the business.

I can lay my hands on four "web desinger professionals" here and frankly I wouldn't let them touch anything but web pages. Web pages are not critical. What does amaze me is how long they can take to deliver certain changes, the only thing slower are C++ programmers on our pc based servers.

60K low? Yeah, if they were a C++ programmer or programmer in a real language on a mini or mainframe.

edit

[Anonymous Coward]

edit:
Among the findings: over 70% of people in this field who have time to fill out a survey earn less than $60K per year

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Skadet]

Whoa there, cowboy. I see by your UID that you're probably an old-timer, so let me explain to you how things work now-a-days.

sorry web design is not nearly as difficult as many make it out to be.

Making a web page for your mom's cat? Sure, not a difficult thing. Creating slashcode? Drupal development? SQL architecture? That's worth more than $60k.

"Web pages are not critical", are you for real? You might not have seen this, but sites like MySpace, Friendster, et. al. are making more money than many "real" programs on "mainframes".

zomg, I think I just got trolled. I tip my hat to you, sir.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Chineseyes]

Yeah, if they were a C++ programmer or programmer in a real language on a mini or mainframe I love when people talk about real languages. Please define what a real language is. I am not a web developer in fact I all of the work I have ever done was c, c++, backend php development, and some php internals. We are rapidly approaching a point where a very large percentage of applications will be able to be written in scripting languages (BE AFRAID!!) because of the amount of system resources available to the average person. Is this a good thing? I don't know, but at some point writing applications in the real languages isn't going to make economic sense.

45k in california, man.

[Skadet]

I live in a metro area of California, have a B.A. from the UC, am in my mid-20s with no kids/wife/mortgage, have been building web sites and learning web technology for 10 years, give or take, and am one of the more sociable, agreeable nerds I know. I have 5 years of hands-on LAMP/js/css/Flash/AS experience (as in, got paid to do some work for someone)

I make $45k.

At least it's up from my first post-college job at Clear Channel Radio -- that was $43k.

The problem is the guy right above me in the reply thread: the people who decide salaries think web "design" isn't hard. Everyone knows a kid down the street who builds web sites. So you take a job doing something you like and make just enough to stay afloat and take your girl to a movie once a month, or you rage against the machine and let the next starving college kid come in and take that money.

Whatever.

Re:45k in california, man.

[Facetious]

I would like to see a wage breakdown by geographical area. Frankly, I don't know how anyone in a California metro area gets by. If the reference to those who "think web 'design' isn't hard" was aimed at me, I didn't mean to imply any such thing. I hate to see those who can produce static pages in Dreamweaver be thought of as web designers.

Re:45k in california, man.

[zenslug]

If you are only making $45k you should find a new job, someplace that will appreciate your skills. The job market is pretty good in the SF Bay Area for web design. You should be earning at least $60k.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[RealSurreal]

I don't think you understand what "web design" is. A web designer doesn't go near a sql server.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Surt]

If you're designing sql architecture, that's not web design in the conventional sense, and I doubt that is who they are considering in this salary survey. Our sql architects make 150k+. Our web designers make a lot less.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[butterwise]

The reason it seems low is because not many people are solely "designers" any more, and more often than not are asked to bridge over between design and development. I count myself among those ranks, and while I may not be the world's greatest PHP/MySQL developer, I know my way around the code and can solve a lot of the problems that a "developer" might normally be asked to tackle, leaving them to go after the big fish. I don't just create designs, chop up PSD and write HTML.

Not really just design here...

[sc00ch]

If you read the results you'll find its actually asking anyone involved with the web really. This really annoys me coming from such a respected publication.
The Job Title for example shows 25% are in fact developers, 19.9% are web designers and even includes writers/editors making up the other 55%. Without understanding which job titles correlate to all the other questions it seems a bit pointless. I know some of the biases compare the different titles but not many.

Re:Not really just design here...

[AVee]

Thats cool, even I could be included. I just wrote a line of text and it's on a webpage...

Arrgh

[wsanders]

There actually seem to be very few IE-only sites left. Firefox 2 is VERY good about dealing with IE-centric sites. The compatibility problems are with earlier versions of IE, and earlier versions of Firefox.

And with the giant turd-ball of shite known as Flash 9.

We just went through this with a design company that others-who-shall-not-be-named hired to "design" our new corporate web site. They delivered pages that were only compatible with IE7 and Flash 9. Actually, they worked with Firefox and Flash 9, too, but crashed IE 6 and earlier versions of Flash.

We had to argue with them a bit to get them to deliver a IE 6 and Flash 8 compatible site (sorry, the others-who-shall-not-be-named insist on a Flash site). Finally they had to send a guy on site to our office for a day to fix their broken stuff - because they had no non-IE7 non-Flash 9 environment to test in.

No one does QA anymore, anyhow, meh.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[NickFitz]

I see by your UID that you're probably an old-timer

243324? He's a young whippersnapper.

He certainly talks rubbish, but that's due to severe intellectual deficiency, not age: note such warning signs as the use of "your" instead of "you're", misuse or non-use of commas, "its" instead of "it's", "desinger" instead of "designer", complete lack of understanding of any technology whatsoever...

I diagnose a low-grade troll, but his gross stupidity isn't due to being an old-timer; he was born with it.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[timoni]

I work in SF as a web/UI designer and I make more than $60K. There's a huge scale in terms of website quality, front-end and backend, and you usually get what you pay for. (BTW I think you're underpaid.)

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Anonymous Coward]

some people use the term inter changeably. I've seen it applied to that in a job description and even ask for C++ and Sql Server. To which I had to let the recruiter know they wanted a developer and NOT a designer. Still MVC in the web world is a hard concept to come by; I find very few professional web devs who are familiar with this concept and can use it in a LAMP environment mainly due to the fact that Zend, Cake and the other MVC tools out there are severely clunky and slow and come across more like toolkits than frameworks.

But How Many Web Designers Read Slashdot?

[RobotRunAmok]

I mean, actual Designers? Sure, plenty of HTML/CSS jockeys do, but that's a whole different discipline. And I wonder what the ratio of HTML jockey to designer was amongst the 33,000 people who responded to the survey was...

My experience -- not academia, not corporate intranet, not "blogosphere," not Church Group, but entertainment industry -- is that people pay pretty well for a new site design. But my guess is that better than half of the people who responded to the survey hardly even speak the same language as the artists who do that. In budgeting for various satellite and cable start-ups, I've never allocated less than $55K for the website.

Now, I've personally coded dozens of sites -- for academia, corporate intranet, "blogosphere," and Church Group -- but damned if I consider myself a designer. I've never expected to be paid for my work there (neat, trim, elegant though it might be...), in the same way I don't expect anybody to pay to come and watch me play basketball.

It's been said before, but it bears repeating: HTML ain't code, and Code ain't Poetry

Perception of design.

[MaWeiTao]

There's a big problem design in general faces. It's seriously undervalued. And I think the problem stems from accessibility. Desktop publishing has inspired a revolution in design, but at the same time it's been very detrimental to the industry.

It has made design tools pervasive. It's created this attitude that good design is something anyone can do provided they know how to use to the software. It's completely screwed with expectations on the part of clients. Some guy in sales believes it should take me a day to lay out a 24 page brochure because he knows how to type a report in Word and import a few pictures. He's convinced he could produce the same layout as I; he hires me because he doesn't have the time for it himself.

These guys also are convinced they understand the nuances of design merely because they browse the web. I can't count the times I've had clients tell me they want the design of the Apple site but they've got the content of Slashdot to fit on the page.

The accessability of design has allowed anyone to get into design. This means you've got hacks working along side of true professionals. For someone who's looking to cut costs they're going to have a hard time seeing why a company charging $20,000 for a web design is that much better than a guy working at home charging $2,000. They may be convinced of a difference in quality, but they'll have a hard time justifying the price difference. It's kind of like the guys who outsource work in order to get some cost savings but end up spending more in the long run just trying to manage the mess that inevitably ensues.

So what's the inevitable result? They're underpaid. Despite the amount of experience, research, planning and production that has to go into a sound design not many are willing to really pay for it. At least they aren't paid on the level of other professionals.

Contrast this IT and programmers. To the average business man what those guys do seems to be voodoo. They don't get it and they don't even want to try. I've known guys earning a handy sum of money while enjoying a 3-day work week. I've known guys who pretty much sat around all day, and others which had horrendous attitudes but they all got by fine because of the mystique of their work. They may end up getting screwed in the long run but while they had the work they were doing better than a designer in a comparable position.

Of course those kinds of employees are the exception. I'm not suggesting people in IT are overpaid. I know a developer who's been working half as long as I have and is already earning more than I do. And he deserves every penny because he's a phenomenal programmer. But the point is that a good designer has as demanding a job and doesn't get compensated as well for it.

But that's the nature of the work. If a designer wants to earn more they have to get into art direction or management. That only comes with experience and at that point you're not really considering a designer anyway.

And I agree that a lot of web designers out there don't really have a good sense of web design. They put art above functionality. But then many of the programmers I've worked with don't have a good sense for interface design either. They'll create something that's convoluted and bloated with features. As much as people like to criticize Microsoft applications they inevitably create something that pretty much has the same exact feel. Good layout design can be challenging.

Re:Perception of design.

[rHBa]

I'm sorry I don't have +1 insightful to give you but I 100% agree, and I'm a developer!

As a (desperate/skint) freelancer I often take on work with people (designers/client facers) who either come from a print/art background or are good at 'using the tools' but have no appreciation of what is involved with making a usable/scalable/accessible web page.

Personally, I like to think I could make an intuitive interface for a CMS but picking complimentary colours and creating a 'pleasing' layout is way beyond my abilities, let alone designing logos etc.

I have one colleague (out of many) who I enjoy working with. The build process is always quick, there are rarely any come backs from the client and, primarily, I can see that his designs are web designs, not just pretty looking layouts i.e no fixed width/height, no unnecessary use of images, pixel perfect only where it should be (no aliased borders etc).

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[sheldon]

Creating slashcode? Drupal development? SQL architecture? That's worth more than $60k.

$65k maybe.... but not a nickel over!

Not enough VACATION

[careysb]

Interesting (and lots of) statistics, but what struck me the most was that over 50% of the respondents were getting 3 weeks or less of vacation a year. That includes people with a wide range of longevity in their jobs and years in the profession.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[JimboFBX]

$150k+ for "get" and "select" statements? Dude your way overpaying. I'm hoping by "sql architects" you actually mean "master web designer who works 12 hours a day constantly adding features and ensuring the servers are always up even if they get knocked down at 1 am and makes a massive spread-out database work fast with underpowered hardware" because it isn't that hard to write database queries. They teach it as a 3 hour class to hung-over business majors dude.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Surt]

I'm not talking about get and select, that's sql development, not sql architecture.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[lena_10326]

sorry web design is not nearly as difficult as many make it out to be. Some of the cumbersome tools and even client requirements can make it work - but its not like writing the back end that serves these pages or runs the business.

I've done both: server work and front end web design. The difficult part of server work is usually integration with other systems as well as designing for performance. There are two back-ends: the internal architecture that encompasses your database, support scripts, and custom server code, and then there is the CGI layer, which queries and formats the data for presentation. The easy part of back-end work is with CGI scripts, which is the link between the real back-end and the front-end (browser). Writing CGI scripts to serve those pages is stupid simple, usually performed by junior developers, so it's not like all back-end work is touchable only by the resident genius guru.

Your insulting comment is correct in that parts of web design work is easy. Processing images, slicing pages, and uploading them is quite easy, but so is writing a CGI form that gathers a user's information and inserts a record into a database. The difficult part of web design is with managing the information architecture of the site, integrating various applications and their project files, as well as dealing with browser and CSS idiosyncrasies. Those aspects are similar to database architecture, systems integration and project files, and dealing with operating system and language idiosyncracies. It's not surprising to me that the difficult parts of both happen to be logically very similar.

The reason web designers are paid less is due to the fact it's a creative and desirable job, so more people are going to apply. It's also a field in which your portfolio makes or breaks you. You are judged quite heavily on the visual quality of your work. Producing visually stunning output, does does not mean you're a HTML/CSS/Javascript god. The problem with this scale of judgment is that it's based on what a manager sees. You and management see a nice illustration and you drastically under-estimate how time consuming creating that illustration can be. Of course, you don't try to reproduce it yourself and find out, but you judge anyway.

Software developers are judged with a different scale, which is generally work experience and education level. You aren't judged by the quality of your code*. You get to hide behind the cloak of mystery, safe in the knowledge management will never see or understand your work. Management only sees whether your product performs the task it's supposed to do or not. It could be an architectural nightmare slapped together with a fragile hodge-podge non-framework--a spaghetti code mess. But, do you lose income if you produce such a colossal piece of shit? No. You get a raise because you "optimized" a query to return results back in 2 seconds instead of the 10 seconds as before.

Web pages are not critical.

Which, you posted using a web page. Irrelevant, but funny.

What does amaze me is how long they can take to deliver certain changes, the only thing slower are C++ programmers on our pc based servers.

Maintenance changes to the back-end often follows along the lines of adding a new column or table to the database, so it's not like those changes you make are all that complicated to begin with.

60K low? Yeah, if they were a C++ programmer or programmer in a real language on a mini or mainframe.

Difficulty is relevant. If you're a mainframe developer, you are expected to know your trade. Lots of people can't do what you can do; accountants, lawyers, salesman, delivery boys, etc. Big deal. I know what you do is not that difficult. I've done work in assembler and writing network server processes that many consider "difficult", but in truth it wasn't. Knowing how to do it doesn't make me smarter than a we

WIthout reading the survey, let me guess...

[Jeff Jungblut]

Income was inversely proportional to amount of time spent writing blog posts. I'd read the survey myself but I have to get back to work.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[Anonymous Coward]

for posting this.

Moderators, let's make this asshole's subscription worthless by ruining his karma. I'm a metamoderator and I've always let things like this slide- and I know I'm not the only one ;)

What do you have to back up that assertion?

[Rix]

I find it entirely plausible that women, when averaged across a reasonably sized population, do less work for employers than men. Don't you think it's reasonable to conclude that women, in general, take more time to care for children?

Definition Police

[cromar]

The use of the word "bias" in statistics means "a systematic distortion of a statistical result due to a factor not allowed for in its derivation." This meaning is quite different from that of the common usage of "bias." (Thanks NOAD.)

Re:Definition Police

[oni]

That's clearly NOT the meaning that the authors intended, as evidenced by use of the word "perceived." This was a survey where they asked people, "do you perceive any bias here" and then they compared the salaries of people who perceived bias with those who did not. The only possible way to interpret the word bias in this context is unfair discrimination.

And the results are quite interesting. If a woman *thinks* there is discrimination, she tends to make more money than a woman who doesn't think there is any discrimination. The opposite is true of men. I don't even know how to begin to interpret that.

HaHaHaHaHaHa

[Anonymous Coward]

Salaried workers don't get paid overtime, but they get paid for overtime in the form of bonuses and salary raises that reflect on the perceived or real performance that results from extra hours worked.

If you have a man who works 50 hours, and a woman who works 40 hours all year, and the man is 10% more productive as a result of his 25% longer hours, which are you more likely to reward with a larger raise? What fantasy world do you live in? Are you pushing that bogus corporate bull, or do you actually believe it? In the real world, if you are a dedicated, hard worker, they just work you harder, with puny, token rewards. Then they unceremoniously dump you when their bad management results in less work or profits. Then they outsource your job to a third world country where PhDs work your job for pennies on the dollar.

Rewards, raises. Hah! Good one. Welcome to the 21st century, now give me fries with that order.

Re:HaHaHaHaHaHa

[Surt]

I think this is a matter of choosing the right employer. Don't work for big companies is the #1 rule. Small companies understand who really contributes to the bottom line. The visibility is much, much higher. Once a company hits about 1k employees, it becomes impossible for the leadership to see to the bottom, there's just too much information. At best, they can see what areas of the company are most effective. Individual contribution is lost in the volume.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Shivetya]

you missed the primary issue I raised.

The four I can get my hands on doing the front seen by others, they aren't responsible for writing the services that get the data, maintain the data, or update it. Perhaps it is different at other places but what I deal with are people are merely presenting data from established systems.

Making more money? If you ask management mainframers and similar large systems only cost money. The problem is that its where the business's data resides and keeping it going and bringing it out to exploit new technologies like web presentation requires a different skill set. This is like dealing with our b2b people who claim they are the profitable side of our computing resources because our vendors pay to use our site. Too bad we buy from the same vendors.

So in a system where the web designer is closer to the data then yeah your justified in your view. However that isn't worth more to me than what the systems programmers I need are doing. Not all businesses are applicable to the web but our A/R and A/P are many times more critical than our web side because we have ways around a failure of the web side... we don't have a way around a failure in the A/P and A/R sides. If they suffer failures we are losing money, possibly facing fines, and the like.

That is mission critical to me. For Amazon their web side is mission critical because that IS their connection. For us its an added benefit it letting our customers interface with us through more automated means. However they are just as likely to call when "its important"

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Anonymous Coward]

Creating slashcode? Drupal development? SQL architecture? That's worth more than $60k.

Bullshit. These days, everyone is and everyone has a web designer. The demand for computer professionals isn't what it used to be, thus the salaries drop.

My wife used to be a nurse, but left the field because she was tired of getting paid shit wages. Apparently a lot of other nurses felt the same way and left the field, as well, since the hip new thing was to be a physicians assistant. A few years later, she was reading an article about how nursing salaries were on the rise because they were in such demand.

You're in an over-saturated profession, so don't make up excuses about how your job is so much harder than anyone else's and that you should be paid more. You trained for it - it shouldn't be that hard. Like everything else that costs money, salaries are determined by supply and demand. Unless, of course, if you work for a union - then it is solely determined by demand.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Dausha]

"Making a web page for your mom's cat? Sure, not a difficult thing. Creating slashcode? Drupal development? SQL architecture? That's worth more than $60k."

None of that is web design, which is what the GPP was referring to. You are describing web development. Web _design_ involves making things look good, not making complex behaviors work.

$60k!!

[jshriverWVU]

Maybe I'm not getting paid enough but 60k is the benchmark!? Personally I'd be grateful to make 35-40k and that's senior admin level. Am I getting screwed?

Re:$60k!!

[/dev/trash]

Do you work with me? I make just under 28k.

Re:$60k!!

[Anonymous Coward]

The answer is conditional and dependent upon several factors, but primarily skill set and local job market.

I'd venture a guess however and say probably, as likely a fair amount technically skilled people have a limited grasp of business concepts (due to spending all that time with technology), and thus get screwed.

If you really want to know how much you're worth, apply and interview for positions similar to what you're doing now in your area, and see what they're willing to offer to pay you. If you get a job offer for more than you're making now, you can use that as leverage to negotiate a pay raise at your current job, or accept the job offer.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[JCSoRocks]

aaaand those same business majors (if allowed anywhere near your SQL database) will then write a query that brings your server to its knees as they try to join 20 different tables together, using no indexed fields and using only "LIKE" statements for where clauses against nvarchar(max) fields. Good luck with that! Knowing how to write a query and knowing how to write the most efficient query possible are two completely different things. (The same is true of database design in general).

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Anonymous Coward]

And by the way, this shit . . .

Slow Down Cowboy!

Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 53 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Chances are, you're behind a firewall or proxy, or clicked the Back button to accidentally reuse a form. Please try again. If the problem persists, and all other options have been tried, contact the site administrator.

. . . is getting fucking ridiculous!!

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[soliptic]

True, but RTFA: the report includes web developers, who almost certainly do, as well as information architects, usability consultants, project managers... it was open to the whole spectrum of web-related jobs.

Trick question!

[Anonymous Coward]

> If you have a man who works 50 hours, and a woman who works 40 hours all year, and the man is 10% more productive as a result of his 25% longer hours, which are you more likely to reward with a larger raise?

Neither. You tell them both that there's no budget for raises this year but that their dedication will be remembered in the future, then collect a bonus for keeping labor costs down.

cost of living

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how you can gather much information from a flat income statistic without factoring in cost of living. Sure most web-designers make 40-60k, but what if you live in BFE, TX and the average 4 bedroom new house cost a lil over 100k. Someone please educate me. I definatly feel underpaid.

How the fuck?

[r_jensen11]

How the fuck does one page have more than 2MB of content to download, excluding audio and videos?

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Poromenos1]

Or anything that doesn't actually get sent to the user.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[mstahl]

A web designer doesn't go near a sql server.

I do, and I consider myself most of the time to be a graphic designer. I'm a programmer by trade but I design printed items, web sites, clothes, things. I'm also the world's worst sculptor and a somewhat decent illustrator/cartoonist.

However, for most designers, you're right. It's incredibly frustrating actually working with them because I could speak their language just fine but they couldn't speak mine, and I think it really bothered them too. That's why, at around $60K, I was making more than most of them were.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[mstahl]

You get a raise because you "optimized" a query to return results back in 2 seconds instead of the 10 seconds as before.

That's why there's acts_as_enterprisey for us Rails developers.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's one problem - one person says they're a designer when they're a developer. Another developer is really a designer. Another one is an architect.

Technically, Web Designers shouldn't need to pop open code, at all. They design the page. The developer makes it work. A good designer gets it, a great designer gets what the developer needs and the end user will benefit from: no huge images, no flash driven sites, accessibiliy, usability. It's a package deal, and I don't think I've ever met a designer that fits it, not a developer that gets the design.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[colenski]

bzzzt. wrong. all serious web developers use sql server or other db. you have no idea what is expected from a modern site designer.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Anonymous Coward]

A web designer doesn't go near a sql server.

I do, [...] I'm a programmer by trade

You also appear to be an idiot.

Money not Time

[haakondahl]

I disagree. The man worked 10 hours of overtime every week, so the 25% additional time worked actually cost the company 37.5% (I think) more money. And this is what the baseline for productivity is: neither hours nor weeks, nor any other measure of time, but MONEY. A business wants to maximize productivity (and therefore dollars of revenue) per dollar of cost.

The woman produces 100% (as the standard) per dollar. The man produces only 110% of her production, but costs 137.5% of her cost. He is producing at 72.7% of the woman's production per dollar.

The man's toast--give the woman a raise. And if the man isn't fired (for slowing down on his overtime, assuming that his 40-hr rate matched hers), then the business would break even by limiting him and 2-3 just like him to 40 hours and hiring one additional man, ignoring per-employee overhead. Still, the per-employee overhead can be mitigated by limiting a larger number of these buffoons (to spread the cost of the new employee over a greater base). It could be mitigated even further by hiring an additional woman like the one who only works 40 hours, instead of an additional man like the 50-hour slacker.

Re:Money not Time

[Surt]

This whole discussion was premised on salaried employees, not hourly. The man and the woman are presumed to be paid equally, regardless of hours. The question is what happens to those 2 employees after a year of the many working 25% more and being demonstrably 10% more productive over the course of that year. Which one will get the larger salary adjustment?

Re:Money not Time

[haakondahl]

Ah. In that case, I agree. The woman is toast. I don't know any salaried folks who work only 40 hours.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[Anonymous Coward]

No serious web developer uses SQL Server when we've got a whole host of great open source databases to chose from.

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

[49152]

Bzzt, wrong again ;-)

Web designer != Web developer

But sometimes the same person can do both jobs.