| I think that like in most industries, the low-end has become commoditised. Want to sell stuff online? It used to cost thousands of dollars to get an online store up and running. Now you can sign up to Shopify and start selling your stuff the same day using a theme that, to be honest, is more than good enough for what it costs. The same goes for brochure sites, a space now filled by Squarespace and Wix and so on. Cheap or free options have always been around, but now you can get a theme that is more than good enough. But that's great for web designers, right? Anyone wanting to only pay $25/month for that kind of product is going to be a terrible client for anyone trying to make a proper living in the space. Work for web designers isn't drying up overall, it's just that the low-end – the work we didn't want to really do anyway – has become commoditised. The higher-end work – the more challenging problems to solve, the ones that need proper design thinking to solve – is still around, and it's become much more specialised. |
>The higher-end work – [...] – is still around, and it's become much more specialised
The specialisation means that work for "web designers" has declined IMO.
I used to do sites for local charities and SMEs. They tend now to use Wix or WordPress with a template, something along those lines.
Those who can afford something more bespoke have much greater expectations and web design as a field has grown. Just keeping up with the pace of change of browser tech is hard now, never mind everything else that goes in to a "simple" webpage - one needs a team to do it properly IMO. So the generalists, as I once was, are really not in demand anymore.
The web designer has been killed off by commoditisation and specialisation and there increased expectation and possibilities that are now part of the everyday web.