Unfortunately the design industry isn't regulated so any Tom, Dick, Harry and Sue (i'm not sexist) can call themselves a website designer these days just because they happened to build their 12 year old cousin a 'hobby' website or whatever.
It goes much further than that, the way the industry is going with easier to use tools doesn't just mean that more people can set themselves up as 'web designers', it means that more and more businesses do not need to commission web designers, the business people themselves become the 'web designers'. This has happened already in photography, desk top publishing, word processing (managers typing their own letters and emails), and it is happening now in web design - just ask some of the businesses on this forum, the hundreds of
mrsite customers, the thousands of
Microsoft Office Live customers, and the thousands of businesses using
DIY web building packages from the various hosts. And that's just the easy sitebuilder side of the DIY web design market, there's also the slightly more complex DIY web design tools market too with software like
www.websitex5.com or using
www.nvu.com with templates from
www.oswd.org
This state of affairs will only continue, as the new generation of business owners and decision makers - the ones brought up with the knowledge of creating their own myspace, bebo, facebook, friends-reunited, ebay pages or sites - are tasked with buying a company website.
Only very recently on
this forum was a startup business on a very low budget going through this DIY web creation process, and the end result, which is pretty good for the budget is at
www.exoticdetail.co.uk
If anything there will be less point in someone setting themselves up as a web designer as there just wont be the market, and only the web designer 'wheat from the chaff' will filter through and continue. I also reckon that with the rise in popularity of diy tools like sitebuilders, some people who used to be 'web designers' will embrace these new tools and add value to them by focusing more on designing graphics, banners, templates, etc rather than the whole website (this is already happening to some extent with web designers offering semi-bespoke solutions based on content management systems like Joomla or ecommerce systems like VirtueMart, osCommerce, Actinic, CubeCart, etc).
There will still be a need for good custom web designers, as with photography, whilst there are things you can do yourself, there are also more important jobs that require the professional touch, and sitebuilders only meet the needs of businesses who have fairly common website needs, anything out of the ordinary then you still need custom development.
This is one of my little pet hates as people like myself are fully qualified with design qualifications and have spent years and time carving out a profession for ourselves and then you get these design cowboys who think they can charge a nominal fee for a crappy piece of work that's got no creative input, is ill thought out, looks crap and fails to do it's job properly.
That might be the case with some 'web designers' creating websites but it is not the case with most sitebuilders. Sitebuilders such as the
instant site package used by 123-reg, have been designed and developed by professionals, the company behind instant site is
SWSoft. A sitebuilder is an extremely complex piece of software engineering, we know this from developing our own
sitebuilder service. The swsoft
templates have also been designed by design professionals using professional photography and professional models. Sitebuilders are designed to minimise or even remove any custom coding requirements so there is less chance for things to go wrong, and the good ones have search engine friendliness and some onsite SEO features as standard.
You are quick to big yourself up and be dismissive of others, but interestingly
your home page reminds me of a DIY myspace type layout, the news section on the home page doesn't work correctly in the most popular browser IE6, and there are nearly 400 errors when you w3 standards
validate the site. At present I would have to say that the business I mentioned earlier that went the budget DIY route has done a better job with their website.
People forget that a website is a REPRESENTATION of your business. It is the modern window shop. But unlike a window shop people make their minds up whether to browse or not in FIVE SECONDS.
Why would anyone want to represent their business with a cheaply designed and implemented website??????
If you can't afford a decent one then don't get one at all. Once someone visits your site and leaves it without being interested you have lost them forever.
Unlike a normal window shop that people will walk past on a daily basis the web has literally billions of window shops all vying for business....do u really think people stop and look at the cheap ones????
There are some that say if you are serious about your business then you should be paying more for your website - which is also true. But my opinion is that there is a sliding scale of how much does a business really need a website, and this scale starts at zero (those businesses that do not need a website) and goes up. Therefore there also exists a sliding scale of how much a business is prepared to pay for a website which meets their needs, and this scale also starts at zero (those businesses that do not need a website) and goes up. There also exists a sliding scale of expectation for websites, you would expect a large corporate company to have a better website than your local market fruit and veg stall. Generally low-end DIY sitebuilders and other DIY tools sit at the low end of these scales in this market.
