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

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?

[kripkenstein]

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

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?

[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.

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

[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!

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

[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: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 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?

[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