
Margins on website development are shrinking - Estragon
http://www.chrishardie.com/2013/05/end-of-website-development/
======
omd
I've had the same experience the past few years with car maintenance.

\- I can find any owner's manual online.

\- I can find detailed instructions for any type of repair in written form or
in a Youtube video.

\- There are free online courses for anything from changing a tire to becoming
a full-fledged mechanic.

\- I can find and order any part of my car at wholesale prices.

\- The same diagnostic software that repair shops use can be downloaded for
free. I can hook up my iPad to my car through a simple USB cable and find out
exactly what's wrong with it.

And I still take my car to the local auto repair shop, because I'm not a
mechanic.

~~~
dworin
That metaphor doesn't work for two reasons. First, over time a car has grown
MORE complex, while the tools to create a website have grown LESS complex. At
the same time, improved quality in engines, motor oil, and service technology
has made routine maintenance not only easier, but also less expensive. Second,
auto repair, like most skilled trades, is a great example where specialization
of workers gets involved. It's not that you can't spend the time to learn how
to repair a car, it's that you consider your time worth more. But in many
cases, the cost of building a website has come down so rapidly that it doesn't
require a big time commitment for many people.

There will always be room at the high end to solve problems that are
complicated, large, or rare. But at the low end, things that were new 20 years
ago just aren't anymore. Website development is becoming less like a mechanic
and more like pumping gas.

~~~
gwgarry
\- Websites have become much more complex. It just appears that they are
simpler. WP makes it seem like nothing to press a button and upgrade. Behind
the scenes thousands of lines of code are doing work. When those lines of code
break and you come to me to fix them. Fuck you for thinking I am going to
charge you $100. You are going to pay me $1000 or you can do it yourself.

\- If you want to use a theme exactly as it is then fine use it exactly as it
is. If you want me to make changes to it, fuck you for thinking I am going to
do it for $100.

\- Websites are complicated as ever (with tools that don't match their behind
the scenes complexity), they appear to be much simpler because a lot of stupid
people have spent thousands and thousands of hours providing services for free
through modules and themes. But when those things break down or don't work the
way you want them to, you will pay for my 15 years of experience or you can
just do without.

~~~
goostavos
Out of curiosity (not being snarky), how's that working out for you, and how
long do you think it will be viable to charge that amount?

Web dev, as I see it, is undergoing a race to the bottom. As you say, "the
stupid people" are generating good content for free. Yes, there are 1000s of
lines of code behind WP.. but those 1000s of lines of code exist just so that
the end user doesn't have to mess with them. Do people really pay 1000 to
adjust a word press theme?

~~~
gwgarry
> generating good content for free

They are not generating it for free. They sell themes at $50 pop to at least
100 people. They make their $5,000. They also charge $100/hr for support.

> those 1000s of lines of code exist just so that the end user doesn't have to
> mess with the

Until things break. The developer goes away, etc.

> Do people really pay 1000 to adjust a word press theme?

Depends on what level of adjustment. If I charge them $1000 they will get
$1,000 worth of services. But I am not willing to engage a client unless they
are at least willing to spend that much. Not worth my time.

~~~
_k
When things break ... but websites for SMBs break less and less.

------
didgeoridoo
All the tools mentioned in the article are mainly useful to the bottom of the
market; low-budget customers can now put together something half-decent on
their own.

If anything, this is GREAT for us as web developers. We've taken to pointing
prospects to ThemeForest if we don't think a custom site would add significant
value to their company. It keeps us from having to do boring & repetitive
work, so we can focus on the fun, high-impact stuff.

~~~
_k
The fun high-impact stuff rarely drives the customer's bottom line.

------
theg2
Judging by the amount of people in my office who can't handle something as
simple as formatting a Wordpress post correctly...I think it's a bit pre-
mature.

Yes, most things have been made far easier, but good design and code skills
still trump most of the out of the box systems out there and those themes he
mentions are a form of web development, just not the ones making the author
any money.

The good web developers are generalist developers at heart and will always be
looking at the next bleeding edge system/project/new shiny to work on and
deliver the new and shiny to customers.

------
onemorepassword
The title should be "the margins on bottomfeeding are shrinking".

I consider this a good thing. Now if only these companies could stop calling
themselves "developers" altogether, and maybe we wouldn't have to explain so
often to potential clients why our software development is so much more
expensive than their so-called "web development".

~~~
bluehavana
It's the starter-kit Walmart hobbyism. I can buy a bike at Walmart for ~$100.
The bike will get me to where I want to go with reasonably light usage.
Anything outside the first time, light usage model is a ever deepening pool of
cost/value.

Walmart is great if I'm poor and my son needs a bike that he can crash (since
he's just learning) and he will grow out of in the next 2 years; he probably
couldn't put enough miles on the bike to break it within then.

If I want a bike to ride five miles to work everyday, I'm looking at $500
(used) to $1500 for something nice and dependable.

The Walmart model isn't bad as long as everybody understands the metrics
involved.

------
damon_c
Here is the trick:

All of the technologies that your customers supposedly now use to replace the
services you used to offer them, can also be used by YOU... to replace the
services you used to offer with better services in much less time.

Proper use of today's tools will make your customers think you have somehow
gained super powers as you deliver them better results, faster, and with much
less effort than when you had to spend time custom coding solutions that are
now implemented as easily as pasting some javascript code onto your customer's
website.

~~~
jiggy2011
This can work if you get in on the new tools and technologies quickly before
everyone else.

Eventually the expectation of price will go down due to competition.

------
ChrisHardie
Hi, original article author here. Thanks for the great comments and feedback.
I just appended my post to say:

I probably should have used a question mark in my post title instead of an
asterisk. I don't claim to know the future and I get that I'm talking about an
industry and an area of tech that's unpredictable. I've no need to be "right"
about this and am just glad to have started some conversations.

I probably also should have referred to something like "generalist retail
website development for the masses" instead of just "website development." One
part of my current company that is still going strong is a business unit
that's performing hundreds of hours per month of custom software development,
database management and consulting for a client pioneering a unique problem
space where no off-the-shelf tool is going to do the trick. We just had
challenges replicating that scale of project within our company, but that's
been more about roadblocks to growing the way we wanted to than it has to do
with the nature of the industry overall. I fully agree with the commenters who
note that at the higher end of client and project requirements when it comes
to creativity and complexity, there's still a great need for professional
service providers with a broad range of experience and deep knowledge. As I
tried to say in my post, I think the folks working with bigger budget clients
and projects will have plenty of work for the foreseeable future, even if
under a different name from "website developers."

Thanks for reading.

~~~
_k
I disagree somewhat because lots of people I know have a broad range of
experience and deep knowledge but the market for it is shrinking. They do get
calls when things go wrong but other than that, there's not much going on.
Some made the jump to app development but the market's just not there anymore.
That may sound strange to those living in the valley but that's just the way
it is. Some are now teaching others and that seems to be profitable.

------
dworin
This happens in every services industry, not just website development. A
combination of new technology, experience, and the dispersion of knowledge
drive down costs and margins. Nobody hires accountants to do their adding and
subtracting, but there's still demand for experts in new regulations or the
eccentricities of the tax code.

The same thing is happening in website development (and really, all sorts of
technology related services businesses). Over time, the low hanging fruit gets
automated, and margins get compressed.

As your firm evolves, you find margin in one of two ways. You either stay at
the high end, and continuously learn new technologies and how to solve higher
level problems for clients. You are continuously jettisoning your old bread-
and-butter projects to work on the latest and greatest thing, solving new
problems that didn't exist a short time ago.

Or you follow the work down-market and focus on scale and efficiency. You
figure out that you can get profit from process and automation, you turn your
toolkit into an offering that you can sell at a high margin.

Either approach works, but firms tend to get in trouble when they try to
straddle the middle, and just sort of hope that clients will still pay big
margins for work that's become routinized.

~~~
jiggy2011
Very true, though I would suggest that if you live in a western economy and
you intend to go low end you should make sure you are scaling in such a way
that your marginal labour costs are insignificant. For example, rather than
construct websites build tools for building/hosting websites.

It will be impossible to compete on price with elancers if you like eating
food.

------
ahallock
I've had no shortage of people looking for custom websites. Having a fully-
customized identity throughout, warranted or not, is still very important to a
lot of clients. You still integrate with third-party services, whether it's
social media sites, blogs, or e-commerce--but even then, these clients want it
to feel like their own, not some generic, off-the-shelf product.

Also, I've shown clients pre-baked themes to save time & money and they've
been quite offended, or agreed to use one, but then ended up changing the
theme so much, it was hardly worth the effort.

~~~
_k
They feel offended ? When they buy a new car, how does that make them feel ?
It's very similar, imo. You can buy a car as is or you can customize it
somewhat but you never start from scratch. You start from an existing design.

------
grrrando
This article takes a fairly narrow-minded look at the work done by lots of
"website developer" professionals, and an even narrower look at what clients
want from a website, app, etc.. It's like saying that Graphic Design will
cease to be a profession because there's free photo manipulation tools.

There's a valid point that, sooner or later, CMS/app farming isn't a valid
long-term business. But, thankfully, what you don't typically find at these
shops, or on free/cheap online tools is the creativity that many clients
demand.

The author does bring up "Marketing and branding consulting" as one of the two
continuing successful business models. Ok, halfway there. However, anyone
that's worked in marketing or branding knows that ideas are just a fraction of
a successful campaign. A great idea will fail if it's not executed well.

------
kevincennis
Before I got into web development, I spent 4 or 5 years as a recording
engineer. And people were constantly predicting the "end of recording
studios".

Certainly, there was a big shift. Pro Tools got cheap, companies like
Behringer started making affordable large-diaphragm condenser mics that sort
of looked like the nice ones. Line6 and Amplitube were making reasonably
convincing guitar amp simulators. And some studios did close.

But there is absolutely still a market for for experienced recording engineers
and big studios. The difference is that now there are DIY alternatives at the
low end of the spectrum.

This article makes the mistake of predicting the end of web development, when
in reality, all that's happening is that people with simpler needs are finally
starting to see alternatives. Just need a basic home page? Go to Squarespace.
Need a high-performance single-page web app? Still need a real developer. I
don't see that changing soon.

~~~
te_chris
Exactly this. I've made a similar transition and I'll say one thing: we web
people at least don't have to deal with declining customer incomes. The worst
part about being in the audio (live and recorded) biz was not only the bottom
up effect, but the fact that the ROI of the average recording was plummeting
(at least from where I was sitting, for the artists I was working with).

People/Clients still make money on the internet, even off $50-100k plus
builds. $50k on a pro studio album would be damn near impossible to recoup
these days, from what I've seen.

~~~
te_chris
How did I say anything worth being downvoted here?

~~~
kevincennis
Weird. Mine got downvoted a couple times too.

It would be great if people would take the time to point out whatever it was
that they found to be objectionable.

------
incision
I recall similar observations being made roughly 15 years ago in response to
the growth of FrontPage / Dreamweaver and the presence of Angelfire.

------
jiggy2011
I think part of the issue is that many businesses have presence on the "mega
sites" (facebook/youtube/twitter etc) and unless they are going to spend a lot
of money marketing a website their presence on the mega-site is likely to be
getting more exposure (higher up on google , more engagement).

~~~
yogo
Very true, which is why I was expecting to hear them mention that they are
turning into a digital marketing agency, which is what a lot of firms become.
That way they can probably keep charging the prices they are used to while web
development will be part of the package (placed on one of the hosted services
they mentioned or outsourced to another firm/freelancer).

~~~
jiggy2011
True, although "digital marketing" is a somewhat different skillset than web
development.

------
ypeterholmes
"Instead of having us create an administrative interface for updating your web
content, you could just install Joomla, WordPress or Drupal and do it
yourself."

hahaha who? Is your client Stephen Hawking?

~~~
_k
True. But you're competing with Foursquare and GoDaddy websites for $ 1 /
month. I don't recommend people use those services but in the end that's what
you're competing with. Compare that to setting up a website with Drupal.

~~~
ypeterholmes
So you're either severely constrained by a cookie cutter CMS, or completely
overwhelmed by a more flexible platform like Drupal. Ultimately I'm not
hearing anything convincing about why web development has become obsolete.

------
thatcherclay
I think the most valuable thing this is pointing out is that the nature of the
problem is shifting to an integration challenge - how to hook together the 5
or 6 services that I will need to get everything up and running. Most web
driven businesses are going to need some combination of different technologies
at some point - the people who can orchestrate that well are in a good
position.

------
bzalasky
I understand some of the points the author is making, and will have to give it
a closer read when I'm not at work. But I reject the thesis at a glance. Most
clients don't have time to deal with everything related to their web presence,
custom or not. If you're solving business problems, not training them to use
WordPress, you can charge a premium.

~~~
rhizome
Posts like this strike me as comment and controversy bait (more specific than
linkbait). An underinformed post whose points are stated too emphatically
about a large topic.

------
dkrich
I think this is a lot of perception and to be perfectly blunt, complete
bullshit.

People who think that just because tasks have become easier for experts in
that field that they are easier for everyone are just plain wrong. I know this
through personal experience. If you are just making static websites for small
businesses and trying to compete with 1&1, then sure, you're going to have a
hard time getting rich. But _that's always been the case._

You will never make a lot of money selling services to people or businesses
that are highly price-sensitive or just don't need (or see a need) for a more
sophisticated product. I wasted a lot of time selling services to these types
of customers and I can tell you it's a mistake. Choose your customers wisely
and go for one's that have money to spend. That type do not want to spend any
time splitting hairs to get a shitty product. They want something that is
great and will pay handsomely for it. The challenge in that is proving your
worth, but as I said before that's always been the case and there's nothing
new about that.

EDIT: I realize that is a little vague, so let me add some hard numbers. On my
first large web dev contract I built a custom website (not incredibly complex)
for a guy who had a $250k budget. I met him through the local Chamber of
Commerce. I went back-and-forth about how much to charge him for the specs we
discussed and in the end went to him with a quote of $15k (quite a lot of
money for a single project for me at the time) and his response was something
along the lines of "Okay, that sounds great!"

Fuck me for not realizing that I could have charged more. Moral of the story
is one that is becoming trite at this point: people who know how to code and
sell are rare but for some reason seem to undervalue themselves a great deal.
That's a huge advantage for those that do not.

~~~
ScottBurson
You seem to have missed the part where they were successfully running a web
development business from 1997 to about 2008, when things started to change.

The point about choosing your customers wisely is certainly true, and I'd
expect the OP would agree with you on that, but it doesn't invalidate the rest
of what he's saying.

~~~
dkrich
I see so from 1997 - 2008 things were awesome, then they sucked, but now
they're great again!

Do you honestly think web development technologies have hit some inflection
point after which everyone can build their own web applications? People have
been saying that about technology for hundreds of years (that it can't
possibly improve) and they are always wrong. If you are trying to sell your
services and you are competing with commodity web developers as the author
plainly implied is now the case Im afraid I have some bad news for you: you
suck at selling and should work to improve that before learning the next hot
technology. There will always be more work.

------
lpvn
Automation has eliminated a lot of jobs in manufacturing, I don't know why one
would think that it was gonna be different for web development.

~~~
Guvante
There is still a lot of creativity in creating a website. You can put up a
quick website using a theme and get online for pennies, but would you really
want your online presence to be a theme?

------
jplur
Clients understand the value of design, but the development costs are an
overhead. They expect the finished site to be delivered as soon as the design
has been finalized. Meanwhile, the front end developer is sitting there typing
away, converting a photoshop document into HTML/CSS one tweak at a time. It's
archaic, and I truly hope that it will become obsolete.

------
vlucas
I agree with the premise of this article, but I was disappointed to see that
none of the suggestions included focusing on web _application_ development
instead of web _site_ development. I started Brightbit
(<http://brightbit.com>) 2 years ago with 2 other co-founders, and we have
always focused 100% on custom web and mobile applications, and have referred
100% of the smaller websites to local CMS/WordPress shops around us who serve
them.

With our focus on building more complex high-end web apps and startups, we
have had no shortage of work or shrinking margins, and have in fact
experienced the exact opposite. We have been raising our rates, and have
continued to experience strong growth and have had very happy clients.

Long story short, there is another path away from general web development with
pretty good margins if you're willing to learn more and do more programming
work instead of frontend theming/customization work.

------
Falkon1313
I've been seeing things differently. Between myself and my friends/former
coworkers, some of whom are contractors, some in agencies, some internal teams
in non-web companies. Across the board, we've all been rather overwhelmed
lately. It's a constant struggle to keep up, let alone get ahead of the
backlog. Who isn't hiring, subcontracting, or both, just to keep from falling
too far behind? The story the recruiters have been giving us as they try to
lure us away is that it's a developer's market.

I would imagine that using custom development to compete with Geocities or
MySpace style 'build your own page' services is probably not doing as well.
But that market was already thin many years ago. Those services didn't kill
web development as a profession then, and they're not killing it now.

The bit about people who've grown up with this stuff coming into power is
certainly a wildcard, but I like to think it'll be a positive one, not a
negative one that kills the industry.

~~~
porker
> is that it's a developer's market.

Interesting. I've found 2013 much tougher than 2012 - or 2011. All the
agencies round here are recruiting good developers, but the rates for
freelancers have gone down.

I both subcontract and work direct for clients, and work has been distinctly
quiet since February. Mind you, the last 2 years have been amazing, which was
when all the local agencies were laying off staff (or folding). Not sure what
I'm doing differently to make me go in the opposite direction!

------
bliker
I can can recall numerous instances when I opposed to clients idea about the
website. And most of the time it turned out I was right.

People will make sloppy decisions without good advice. I can buy a kitchen
blender, assemble it, make it chop my vegies. But I will never know if it is
any good. Unless it breaks.

------
jquery
So do we need more work visas or not?

------
websitescenes
I don't agree with this article. A canned solution can never compare to a
custom built project. I think that building on top of things like Wordpress
and Joomla is cool but not for a professional developer. Systems like that
make the developer jump through so many conceptual hoops that only exist so
that the lamen can use it. A developer is better of building a custom suite of
tools that are upgraded through time and iteration.

I do agree that end users are utilizing more services online but I don't think
that equates to the death of the developer. I actually think that this makes
good developers worth more.

------
juddlyon
This overstates was the vast majority of clients are capable of. The very low-
end is definitely eroding though and it's a good thing.

I've used a ton of CMSs and blogging engines and think Squarespace is the
future of where this is headed.

------
tootie
I'm in the high-end web consulting biz and there is no shortage of customers
looking for fork over millions for an end-to-end solution. Even at the low-end
that he is bemoaning, the plethora of off-the-shelf tools is coupled with a
massive explosion is the number of businesses requiring a web presence. Now
they can all get a decent looking site up for cheap or even just a Facebook
page for nothing, but the next frontier will be differentiating themselves
from their competitors which will require professional services.

------
belorn
I wish that the article was true and no one needed to do all this web
development work. I truly do not enjoy working with forms and xml.

As many others have commented, its true that the easiest and hastiest form of
web development is now "done" through pre-made tools. Sadly, everything else
isn't as easy. Building a rest api for cool new stuff X is not very easy, nor
is it to present such API on a easy to use designed site. Nor is turning a
horror of an XML standard to a useable form and presenting such things to end
users.

------
danmaz74
Web agencies that aren't able to differentiate themselves in the market will
have a difficult time giving the right advice to customers about their
branding...

------
samatman
This article forgets that using Microsoft Excel skillfully is all it takes to
net a middle-class salary in much of America.

------
piratebroadcast
This is exactly why I enrolled in a Rails developer bootcamp. Its hard out
there for a Wordpress Pimp.

~~~
_k
That makes sense, if there's a market for it. It depends on where you live.

------
danso
C'mon, I can't be the only one who thought the OP was talking about CSS when
reading the title :) . Since the advent of Twitter Bootstrap and the kind of
layouts it inspired, shrinking CSS margins would've be surprising to me.

------
leapius
lol I don't buy this, just take a look at pretty much every CMS (hosted or
otherwise) and weep if you think as a complete amateur you're going to create
a site with their wysiwyg content editable that actually looks half way
decent.

Website design isn't just about being able to create a site without touching
html, it's actually about it looking like a grown up made it. As soon as
you're a few hours into your new creation you're going to want to tweak it (a
lot), good luck sifting through the html soup the editor created for you.

------
ChrisNorstrom
You know what can replace you. Your clients do not. Most of your clients don't
even know what they need. What solutions are available or what problems they
have or will have.

