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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."
~$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.)
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.
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.
"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.
Sony ha
I don't mean to start an offtopic discussion
... you name them.
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,
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
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.
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.