Let’s get credible!

July 7, 2006  

Before I started my business I did what any diligent entrepreneur would do and I wrote a business plan – market
analysis, financial analysis, SWOT, competitor survey, etcetera, etcetera. In the competitor survey I listed
examples of boutique design firms like myself, larger media design organisations, graphic designers, and the like.

Increasingly, however, I’ve come to realise – particularly after speaking with numerous other web designers in
my city – that none of these are of any real competition to me; there’s a lot of web design work out there to
go around, and as long as the Web is around and the technology continues to improve, there will be for years to
come. The real competition, not so much on a personal level as on an industry level, is “a kid with Frontpage”.

The reason that I think this is because the web design industry is suffering from a lack of a professional identity and credibility for a number of reasons:

• There’s no accreditation or governing bodies, no requirement for qualifications, no code of ethics;
• Thousands of “kids with Frontpage” undermining the skill and knowledge required to build a robust, attractive and rewarding website;
• A perception that web design / development is easy (see HTML for Dummies!) and so such knowledge has little value in monetary terms;
• The browser producers still don’t conform to each other’s interpretation of Web Standards (and for that matter, the standards still aren’t clear enough);
• There is a huge discrepency and no real guideline as to what web design firms charge – many (including myself) undercharge in order to attract business away from the “kid with Frontpage”;
• Web designers suffer from an identity crisis – they’re not programmers, or graphic designers, or web masters. They’re a bit of all of those but also none – they are web designers: web development is not the same as application development (trust me, I know!); web design is not the same as print design; web usability is not the same as from industrial usability and writing copy for the web is not the same as writing copy for a magazine or book. They share very similar principles and ideas but for a different medium. Therefore web designers have to know about all of these things specifically for the WWW as well as other aspects such as testing, browser compatibility, accessibility, search engine optimisation, copyright, etc. These are specialist skills which most “kids with Frontpage”, print-based graphic designers, and programmers lack;
• Many small business still vastly underestimate the value of having a web presence;
• The web is a dangerous place full of predators, spammers, and sharks;
• There are LOTS of ugly sites out there;
• Can you say “Dot Com Crash”?

Ok, I don’t mean to rant but when I decided on a career change from Enterprise Java Consultant to sole trading web designer, it never occurred to me that the change would not only be in my skills used and work environment but also in my losing status as a “professional”! Not only do I feel responsible now for my business, my customers and my source of income but I also feel a responsibility in developing this field of work into a recognised, credible, respected and properly rewarded profession – for my own sake and others’.

Here are ways that I think I and other web designers in the trenches can contribute to this:

• Emphasise the importance of, support and adhere to web standards to clients
• Support the development of a Code of Ethics or something similar
• Don’t undercharge clients!
• Keep abreast of up-and-coming technologies and standards such as CSS3, WCAG 2, Ajax, etc

I’d love to hear about any other initiatives to boost the credibility of this field of work and other suggestions for web designers.