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."

And they made a PDF...

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

Re:And they made a PDF...

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.

First ever?!

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

Bias?

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?

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?

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 [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, ... you name them.

CC.

Good design also has to look good

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

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

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.

Surprised? Not really.

~$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

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.

Glad it's not a profession that I chose

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

Re:Low? 60k for web design?

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?

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?

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

In other news...

...there are 33,000 web professionals.

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

Oblig. web design site.

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

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

I don't know what's scarier

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

About the wages

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.

What About IE?

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

Not really just design here...

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.

But How Many Web Designers Read Slashdot?

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.

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.

Not enough VACATION

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.

WIthout reading the survey, let me guess...

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.

$60k!!

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?