Shape
Estimates of the size and shape of the industry - businesses and individuals constructing sites on a commercial or other basis - are problematical. As with much writing about the web, striking anecdotes and myths are easier to find than hard figures. Overall it seems clear that the industry is highly fragmented. Size is not necessarily an indicator of expertise or effectiveness.
The number of standalone major specialist web design houses - many of which featured in glossy journals from 1995 onwards and were the recipients of awards - appears to have shrunk as business models (or merely expenditure) proved unsustainable.
Many major clients appear to be turning to more traditional advertising/design houses (which in turn often outsource their online activity to specialists on a project basis), with online survivors rebadging themselves as 'new media' or digital production houses. As with the metrics business, there's been considerable consolidation among the players and cutbacks in their offerings.
At the bottom of the price scale, technology has started to play a big part: database-driven template “Click ‘n Build” Websites are starting to flourish---but they lack in high-end design and absolute customization and exclusivity.
Small agencies and individual operators continue to enter the market, often buoyed by a belief that a Mac and black tshirt and passion for flash are the ticket for success. There are enough trains leaving the station for some of those beliefs to be correct. Later in this guide we've offered some suggestions about choosing the train that best meets the needs of your users.
Fragmentation
Notice that there are no national-brand names in the United States? There is a reason for this!
Development of much of the market has been analogous to the desktop publishing revolution of the 1980s, when the availability of cheap processing power, irreverence for basic design principles and pliable design software saw the emergence of numerous 'designers' ... and lots of truly horrendous layout with weird typefaces and crude clipart on smudgy purple photocopies.
Fragmentation over the past five years reflects
The newness and craft nature of the industry: no-one has been building websites for more than a decade, most sites are simple and built by hand rather than mass-produced or requiring work by large production teams
Few businesses have grown large enough to command a substantial market share and the lack of large-scale production economies permits small design houses to compete on an equal cost footing with large competitors
Low entry barriers: clients are uncertain about what works or what to expect, anyone with chutzpah and a machine can go online and announce (legitimately or otherwise) that they're a web designer
Demand is so large and diverse that it takes a large number of firms to accommodate buyer requirements. Some design houses have accordingly concentrated on very narrow niches, for example the handful of funeral home site designers such as Funeral Home Web Design and its associate DeathCareWebDesign.Com.
Much work is undertaken by amateurs, semi-professionals or by businesses (large and small) that will deliver products under cost in the hope of establishing a presence
The emergence of new tools such as Flash and disagreement about basic standards or initiatives such as WAI. Two perspectives are provided by figures in Volker Turau's 1998 paper Web Design: Industry vs. University and Richard Miller's Web Interface Design: Learning from our Past paper.
The ongoing tension between the 'graphics' school and the 'usability' or 'information architecture' school (at its crudest, between visual designers and traditional IT people).
A key reason why the Web Design Industry is so fragmented is because it is very hard to scale such services of graphic design. Usually the faster a designer goes, the lower the quality. It’s rare to have an experienced designer who is both good and fast. That’s why very good designs are so expensive—they take a long time.
At MyWebteam, we leverage dozens of high-quality Web designers throughout the country with our unique and patent-pending online Project Management System.
Wanting what you get?
The latter point is complicated by different user needs - given our sense of what visitors to this site want we've leaned towards Jakob Nielsen austerity rather than a flash-saturated, almost cinematic experience best experienced with a big screen and fast connection.
There's an entertaining introduction to that debate in the A List Apart article Usability Experts are from Mars, Graphic Designers are from Venus and in Nalini Kotamraju's 2000 sociology thesis A Skill is Born: The Emergence of Web Design Skill. For a more self-indulgent view see Megan Sapnar's 2002 paper From Text Effects to Canned Goods: Identity Construction and Visual Codes in the Flash Development Community.
Another perspective's provided by Discovering the Gap Between Web Site Designers' Expectations and Users' Behavior, a paper by Takehiro Nakayama, Hiroki Kato & Yohei Yamane. As Steve Krug comments in Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability many web designers think that the user is "just like me". As a result many sites are designed by designers for designers, or by technicians for technicians".
As a result there is some truth in the gibe that the "single greatest enemy of good web design" is the designer from a traditional visual design background who considers web design is all about graphics, color, space, and balance. Those designers want the site to look good, be different, or be "cool". They want the reader to have an experience, although its clear from empirical studies that most users are in search of content (and impatient about finding it) rather than in search of an "experience".
The 'normalization' of the online population means that there is increasing agreement among users about information architectures. That is not the death of avant-garde online design but where most users go, most designers will have to follow.
Others come from a technical background and consider that design is about pushing technical boundaries. They assume (or require) users have fast machines, bandwidth to spare, free time and loads of plug-ins. Many, alas, also assume that everyone has A degree in technical engineering and view playing with web gadgets as "fun”.
