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Future of Web Design Industry?

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I have been in web design business for 6 years now. Over the years many things has changed. Some of the major changes in the industry include:

1. putting behind the 90’s designs that had a lot of colorful and flashing texts (thank God for that!)
2. putting behind the flash frenzy and choosing usability over fully-flash based websites (flash websites are now used for certain type of websites only i.e portfolio, restaurant..etc). Remember how every website on the net was a flash website few years back? Even the corporate sites were using fully-flash websites then.
3. shift from HTML based websites to CSS based websites, thanks to softwares like Dreamweaver that makes this transformation easer. And to organizations like W3C for pushing for the implementation of these new, better standards.

   However the transformation is still not 100%, most of the sites now limit CSS usage to text styling only. I guess that’s because of the difficulty in CSS design, because CSS is more like a programming than web design to many web designers — who got used to WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) way of doing things like in photoshop.

4. and now, shift from static websites to CMS based websites, thanks to CMS systems (including wordpress) that make it easy to build such database driven websites. Good thing about these systems are almost all of them are free.

How does it affect Web Design Industry?

So far, the effect on the web design industry has been only positive. When the flash was introduced by Macromedia and got a huge popularity by everyone. It affected web designers in a positive way. Because now web designers were able to charge a lot higher for their works. (As you know flash websites cost more than double of what normal HTML sites cost).

Similarly, now that the blogging is a huge hit, it too brought a huge opportunity for web designers. Because, blog and design goes hand in hand. Due to huge demand for blog designs, many web designers now have turned into pure “blog designers”. I personally find it easier designing a blog than designing a website. That’s because blogs will usually have the same pre-defined sections (i.e categories, archive, blogroll…etc) most of the time.

Future of Web Design

Few years back I thought in the near future (i.e now) web-design industry will be made irrelevant by big players like Microsoft and others who are interested in internet technologies, who I thought will make it easy for anybody to design a website. I thought people would be able to design websites just by dragging and dropping.

But now, after a decade, web design industry is more relevant than ever. Was I wrong in my prediction or is it just not time yet? We see that there is already some transition from custom web-design to using ready-made templates. But that transition doesn’t really affect web design industry, because, those templates still have to be customized by web-designers for the people who have purchased them. So, they will still be referring back to some freelance web-designers or web design companies to customize their templates.

And even if in the event that there will be some drag and drop technology to create websites in the future. I am sure not everyone will want to use them. Because businesses want to be unique i.e they don’t want to have the same website like their competitor.

Conclusion

I think the web design industry will stay as long as the current HTTP based internet technology stays. Because the current internet technology needs websites to be run in the way they are running now i.e through hyperlinks, and that require web designing. So, unless some other “new internet technology” replaces the current one, which will change the way we interact (maybe we won’t need websites anymore in the future, who knows) the web design industry is here to stay.

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