[prawn]

It's not just that the budgets are harder to justify; it's also that prospective clients consider themselves to be experts. Having your judgement and expertise consistently overruled is disheartening and you often end up just following instructions, sapping any joy from the (diminishing and cheaper) role.

I started my web business 25 years ago. 5ish years ago I started photographing and filming travel content, primarily with a drone. More fun, more interesting, better feedback, etc. When building my own web projects though, I still love it.

[echelon]

No. It's that the job to be done is to sell product.

Not build a handcrafted website. Not build a beautiful website.

Provide something that markets and sells something to customers.

And with that perspective, the client really does know better.

The web is ephemeral. Will it even still exist in twenty five years after AI provides all the answers and connections (all we use the web for anyway)?

[JumpCrisscross]

In many cases, the client is right. I remember a college buddy who designed websites complaining about a problem client. Apparently he wrote their site in Silverlight, and the restaurant wasn’t thrilled someone had to download a plug-in to see their hours.

[ProllyInfamous]

LOL my first "production" website was made around 1997/8 and it required people to install FLASH — not a hit, and no traffic either — because I just wanted it to have this certain featureset =P

[kashunstva]

> the client really does know better.

really _may_ know better.

Some have very skewed notions about UI/UX that don’t conform to how most users (and pertinently, their customers) use web apps; but they will insist on it.

[deanCommie]

You're not wrong.

That is what the web has become. A platform to selling products.

But why did it have to be so? Why couldn't it also have been a medium for expressing beauty?

It still HOSTS a lot of art - art in the form of images.

But the number of truly beautiful artistic WEBSITES - in CSS, HTML, etc, are few and far between.

Hell, I remember the heyday of Flash - before Apple smothered it. There were some INCREDIBLY gorgeous websites with absolutely incredible animations and visuals.

Of course they were dogshit for accessibility, discoverability, information presentation, etc. Not to mention the apalling security/performance of Flash. So I don't wish the whole web was like that.

But we did lose something.

[prawn]

Some may know better for very specific parts of their business, but in the majority of cases, I would say they do not. More often than not, they're the ones pushing for some overwrought site with scrolljacking and needless animation or side-scrolling and the like.

The gripes about web sites you see on HN - they're the things clients insist on.