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First Ever Web Design Survey Results
Posted by
kdawson
on Thu Oct 18, 2007 10:21 AM
from the where-the-big-bucks-are-yeh-right dept.
from the where-the-big-bucks-are-yeh-right dept.
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."
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And they made a PDF... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And they made a PDF... (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Option 1: @@@@@
Option 2: @@@@@@@@@@@@
Option 3: @@
That's beautiful, and don't ask me to draw you a pie chart, because I will.
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First ever?! (Score:2)
Includes the whole group?! (Score:2)
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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).
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In fact, just realised the title is "First Ever Web Design Survey Results", Not Web Designer
Bias? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:4, Insightful)
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 [alistapart.com] — 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.
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Re:Bias? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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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.
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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
Good design also has to look good (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:Good design also has to look good (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Wrong survey (Score:5, Interesting)
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That said, I've talked many, many clients out of building a site entirely in Flash - and they promptly found another designer.
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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.
In other news... (Score:2, Funny)
I thought that, for many people, it was very much an "on the side" activity.
Oblig. web design site. (Score:2, Funny)
In summary: don't be doing this [hrodc.com]. It's not big, and it's not clever.
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Holy crap.
It's the mother that spawned MySpace!
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I agree it's not clever, but boy was it big!
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Incredibly, they do offer web design courses:
http://www.hrodc.com/WEB.DESIGN.htm [hrodc.com]
(Surely it's a joke though? A standard page format, each one populated by "Eliza"?)
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I don't know what's scarier (Score:4, Funny)
About the wages (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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. Do
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What About IE? (Score:2, Funny)
and then why?
Arrgh (Score:2)
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,
Not really just design here... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
But How Many Web Designers Read Slashdot? (Score:2)
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 lan
Perception of design. (Score:2)
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
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Re:Low? 60k for web design? (Score:5, Insightful)
"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.
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Re:Low? 60k for web design? (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
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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.
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Re:Low? 60k for web design? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Which, you posted using a web page. Irrelevant, but funny.
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.
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
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45k in california, man. (Score:2)
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 t