Is Web Design a Dying Career?

These days, you’ll find a number of people asking the same question again and again – is web design dying?

One of the primary reasons may be the fact that anyone can now set up a website. It’s become way cheaper and easier to create websites and start your journey on the internet.

So, is web design a dying career? There are many available templates in the market today. These look very professional and easy to use and customize. However, unique branding and design are more important now than ever, so professional web designers are in high demand for years to come.

Why Do People Think Web Design Career is dying?

For a better understanding, let’s take a look back a couple of years. Web development started flourishing. In fact, web development just went BOOM! Becoming a web dev was a surefire way to build a very successful career. Even I, myself, was caught in the crazy wind. But behind the scenes, there were also a number of things going on.

While the demand for designers skyrocketed, there were also different tools being developed. Clever, efficient tools that would take care of most of the workload of designing web pages. When the time came, these tools completely changed the way of building websites. The impact is so deep that we now can’t even imagine websites without them! As a result, the demand for web designers dropped.

But judging based on the reality, the question in the task is a bit overwrought. There are some good reasons people are now asking for it. Let’s get started by dissecting the symptoms of the so-called “dead” field.

Huge market for Templates

Most of the contents on the web you come across are powered by some sort of frameworks or services. WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Angular, Vue.js, Ember, you name it. These frameworks offer a solid foundation and easier shortcuts for building all the beautiful elements of the web. Thus, one has to spend less time and effort in creating wonderful contents.

As a consequence, the market for templates has become a serious thing. Using any free or paid templates, you can get started with professional-grade websites in minutes! So, why hire a web designer if you can achieve the same level of design with the fraction of cost? The reality is, even most web developers now pick a pre-made template and add some minor improvements, adjustments, and branding.

Either way, if your goal is to get a standard, informational web page, it’s highly likely that there’s already a template to do the job for you.

Web Design Patterns are standardized

What’s the latest design innovation you can point out? Responsive design? That’s ages old. Parallax? Useless eye-candy. All the interface components and patterns we will ever need are already available. That’s why you’re not seeing so much innovation lately.

Well, maturity is actually a good thing for users. As a user, you will always have a consistent user experience of the web. Checkout forms, login pages, shopping carts, and relevant stuff should always work a similar way, right? At this point, trying to be creative in the “obvious” things is literally pointless. Moreover, it’s harmful to the ecosystem.

Automation and AI are doing much of the workload

It’s a brand new trend of automated web design services. Arguably started by The Grid, this service is capable of making automatic design decisions with the power of AI. The AI will analyze your contents, detect various aspects like fonts, colors, imagery and decide the best layout. With cleverly chosen design basics (made by humans) at the core, it’s really tough to go wrong with it. The result? Probably a way better website than an average web designer.

Mobile is killing the Web

How often do you visit the web? How much do you use your desktop? These days, our smartphones are the major gateways for our connection to the web. Now, how often do you type the address? Only when there’s no app associated with the service, right? We, users, don’t seem to care about the web pages much these days. Most of the time, it’s all about calling the name of the brand and checking out the associated app. That’s why the current business trend is to push the mobile app. A large number of websites, blogs and portals are now publishing their mobile apps for the customers.

Interestingly, the mobile web experience was never a happy experience. It’s always slow, and cumbersome. Typing is a weird process. Navigating between tabs isn’t pleasant as well. With the underpowered mobile devices, it’s really hard to keep up with the saturated data networks, even harder to have a smooth web experience like laptops or desktops.

For the mobile market, responsive web design is paramount. No adoption of responsiveness literally translates to committing digital suicide. However, responsive design only ensures that your mobile customers will be able to enjoy your service from mobile device ONLY if she ever finds it. The limited hardware is already occupied with a bunch of other apps.

This will definitely be a fierce competition on speed, better designs and less human intervention.

Web Designing Career is Not a Dying Profession

So, with all the information, is the web designing a dying career? Interestingly, the answer is NO. It’s true that people now can follow an easier solution with less to no cost to set their websites. In the short run, it’s extremely cost-effective and beneficial to individuals and companies. If they can get a working site with just a $60 template, why bother hiring a professional web designer to create a custom one?

But that doesn’t necessarily mean web designers should give up being web designers. The real catch is the viability in the long run. Template selling sites can help to increase and improve the web design business. There are a number of things only a web designer can do, even with clients who want to use a template. Here are the major reasons why there’s no way of considering web designing a dying profession.

Web Security and Maintenance

Having secure websites is crucial for safeguarding the reputation of any serious company. Similarly, proper designing, structure, and maintenance are paramount for effective SEO. The cyber world is full of pesky black-hat hackers who will try to take advantage of vulnerable websites with outdated security settings. Vulnerabilities are quite bad for the reputation. It may be used to leak sensitive information of clients or infect visitors’ computers. Facebook is a vivid example of such a situation.

Rest assured, keeping all these things in the right course is a hefty job. Not many people are enough skilled to manage all the technical factors, for example, patching the security vulnerabilities, performing maintenance activities, and even collect valuable user information.

Often times, commercial companies need customers’ info from e-commerce websites. You can set a website, of course. But keeping all these things together, you need real skill in the field. That’s why companies will always have to rely on the expertise of an experienced, up-to-date web developer. Only then the aforementioned factors can be accomplished.

Specialized Online Branding

According to Nirmal Gyanwali, a web design expert in Sydney, the roles of a web designer includes quality content delivery and delivering the message of branding to the visitors. This makes a lot of sense. Users don’t have to go through the tedious process of reading an unattractive text to understand the type and goal of the service. Instead, they can simply focus on what matters. That’s why you’ll see large corporations with web designers as a part of their marketing team, not the IT department.

There’s a trend in the industry to integrate web designing and marketing together. Why? Because through the website, a web designer can deliver the message to the visitors successfully with the lowest effort from the visitors’ end. Now, there’s literally no boundary between marketing and tech. That’s why web designers have to diversify their skills into more fields, for example, branding, marketing, and content creation.

Specialized Web Functions

Thanks to the rapid development of tech, almost every single thing we do on a daily basis can have a connection to the internet. In this case, web design and development comes extremely handy. However, there are a lot of other factors included in the process. That’s why the skill of web devs should also evolve. They need to extend their realm of knowledge into other sections like Android coding, blogging, customized apps among others.

To say the least, web development isn’t dying but definitely an evolving career, just like any other.

Marketing Expertise

Digital marketing is the most efficient way of making marketing activities. A proper strategy is prime for progressing in the right track. It’s important to perform critical tasks like performing the right marketing activities, setting a proper schedule for appropriate content distribution, etc. Of course, there are professional marketing planners you can hire online. Yet, the experience and expertise of a web designer are extremely crucial to get the best out of marketing activities.

Web Design As An Art

If you love to learn new ideas, incorporate new designs, and enjoy what you’re doing, then web designing is an extremely viable profession for you. Today, people care more about the user experience; the look, the feel and the content of the website. You can expect that the expectation of the visitors will continue growing.

Even tiniest elements like fonts, layouts, backgrounds, infographics, and color schemes, etc. are having increasing importance in web design. Therefore, web design is an incredible opportunity for creatives.

Quality vs Standard Websites

The largest portion of the web contents on the internet is generated by popular frameworks like WordPress, Drupal, Blogger, and others. Unlike custom websites, these frameworks offer universal quality websites. With a plethora of shortcuts and tricks, these frameworks are extremely useful for saving both time and money. Moreover, there are a ton of templates available to them. All you need is just select the type of your website. Let the template do the other task for you.

However, there is still room for making the website more relevant and powerful for businesses. There is a lot of itty bitty stuff that is pretty tough to get right with just the template. A solid example would be designing the website for AdWords relevance. According to Haris Bacic, automation is never going to be 100% replacement for that itty bitty stuff. But it’s a fact that automation is going to reduce the scope of web developers significantly. There will still be professional web designers out there making incredible stuff and there will always be companies hiring them.

Full stack development

Web design isn’t dying. Instead, it’s transforming into full stack development. There are several specialized designs that are still relevant and important, for example, visual design and user experience design. The thing is, web design itself is nothing special; it’s more like a general term associated with building websites, with or without the help of CMS software like WordPress or Drupal.

The fact is, the web is becoming more and more complex. Web apps must become complex and powerful enough to handle the additional demands of the market. More importantly, the web itself has become a complex ecosystem. That’s why the market now demands full stack developers. If a single developer can work with both the front-end and back-end, it can save a lot of time and trouble while being more productive. That’s why the current market (and the future market as well) is more rewarding to devs who are comfortable working with both front-end (like React) and back-end (like Node.js) tools fluently.

In addition, devs have to be fluent with newer techs. Every now and then, there are newer features coming, newer techs emerging. While it’s not a must to become the master in the next big wave, it’s mandatory to remain up-to-date, get familiar with them and keep up with the fast pace of the world. What happens if you don’t? Well, you stay behind the race and the world isn’t rewarding to last places.

In a Nutshell

In conclusion, web designing isn’t a dying field. In fact, it’s very much alive and will continue being so as long as designers are going to cater to the newer trends of the industry. Good web designing skills are always awarding. Combine that with the skill of back-end and boom!

The web development sector will always remain a viable career. With the ever-changing world of tech, this field is also bound to change. It’s certainly on a different form than it was several years ago. It’s simply a matter of adaptation with the changes.