The death of the web design agency | Hacker News Reader

The death of the web design agency

medium.com

62 pointsrobin_reala41 comments

This article jumps around a lot. It seems the main point is the death of the design agency as a model. That's a trend which has been in slow motion for quite some time. Web design as a term probably should be buried along-side the term webmaster.

The articles pulls examples of top agencies and then goes on to talk about services such as Shopify eating into the low-end. As if the top agencies sustained themselves on low-end work.

The article also makes the case that talent is difficult to come by and expensive.

TLDR: Running a business is hard, especially one which has lots of competition and employs a lot of expensive talent in a fast moving industry. You need to adapt. At times adaptation goes well. At other times not so well. But there is no shortage of work for talented developers.

Open up some archives and follow any big company. One year it's a star, the next year it's in trouble.

I'd wager that the margins are diminished because a well-accepted minimum bar has been established that is fulfilled by templates, frameworks, and libraries, that have all reached critical-mass.

Also I've spent several months of development time over the course of my life designing and implementing dashboards in angular 1.x and just the other month I googled "angular dashboard templates" out of boredom and frankly I could've saved weeks implementing $10 solutions that ultimately were better then what I came up with on my own (superior responsiveness, better styling, whatever).

Oh and finally all the start-up design jobs are tied to start-up funding. If the funding goes south companies in the Bay Area will be much less willing to drop $5, 10, 20k on design work.

From my experience Facebook is killing the low-end web design. Smaller companies who would normally need a web site no longer hire an agency for one. They put together a simple one-page landing page using a ready-made template and do all their business through their Facebook page.

That's a very good point. Facebook, google+ and twitter, Whatsapp groups to an extent have made a mass market for small business websites. There is a creche (children study/play school) next door and the lady simply encourages ever parent to visit her facebook page which has all photos and information.

Consider that it is so easy and fun to create a facebook page for your firm. So convenient to maintain it. On the other hand every time a change is required the firm will have to go through the agency route to update its website. Also if you look at the supply side there wont be as many agencies to take up the work for mass markets considering also the delivery and cost parameters.

Can't say I blame them either. For a one-person company the minimum fee for a good web design shop might well be a month of revenue. And Facebook is perfectly acceptable these days for consumer focused small businesses like restaurants, salons, bars and similar small-time retail/service business.

It's not just acceptable, it comes with built in marketing tools. Rather than spending $2000 on a site and then more to advertise it, they make a Facebook page for free and pay $500 on Facebook ads to get some traction. To me it sounds like a better deal.

I think too much investor money is actually the cause of decreased work for agencies. Easy money makes it easier to hire in house design teams. When that dries up companies will likely start outsourcing to cut costs.

At least in the D.C. area, where there once used to be a plethora of design-only agencies, most designers who consult are now folded into traditional consulting groups that serve out a broad base of people from software developers, UX specialists, accountants, scrum managers, etc.

On the other end of the spectrum, small business owners (<$1M revenue) who used to hire agencies now simply hire in-house. Web design isn't a niche occupation anymore, so its possible to just put out a listing and hire someone who will give personal service to you.

I know of some web design agencies in the area that are currently in hiring mode, but they're all new brands and they're servicing external markets. The rest are long existing, and not really growing very fast--either in terms of client base or staff.

If your company is small and you want to have a website where people can learn about your products/services and call you for more information, these days you can use established tools, templates, frameworks, libraries ( like say Wordpress ) to whip one up quickly.

If you consider updating your website quite often you would want that expertise in house and maybe turn your web site into a web application. At that point, I feel that design cannot be decoupled from engineering. Engineers need to understand principles of UX so that they can design good user experiences and designers need to know the constraints of what is possible with the current state of the art and the amount of resources available.

Maybe design and engineering is merging into single role and is causing the effects described in the article.

> Engineers need to understand principles of UX

Engineers need to do a lot of things these days, they are expected to be DBA, ops, network administrators,server administrators on Linux and Windows, graphic designers, UX specialists, HTML integrators, data analysts, security specialists, do sells jobs,customer support and what not. They are required to know 10 languages with all the frameworks and libraries, with 5 years of experience in each language...

Of course, each of these domains used to be a full time job itself, but now, engineers are asked to wear all these hats at the same time.

That's how businesses end up with people who know Angular but barely know Javascript, who know Bootstrap but don't understand CSS box model, who know Mysql, Postgres, Mongodb without basic understanding of data modelling, who know framework X,Y,Z but would be incapable of writing an application secured with a basic authentication system from scratch, who know Docker and AWS but wouldn't be capable of setting up a basic local linux server. but that's not the fault of these engineers, that's what businesses ask, jacks of all trades without any craftsmanship.

I'd rather look at this from a different angle - years of refinement and the development of new frameworks and tooling has led to many tasks being much simpler than they previously were.

The first time I had to set up a highly available service I had to do everything from the ground up - replicated block devices for generated configuration, a master-master MySQL setup, a floating IP address, and monitoring to know when to fail over. If I had to, I probably still could.

Now I just click a few buttons in the AWS console and I've got an S3 bucket, a replicated database server in two different data centres, a load balancer which can do health checks, and a small cluster of EC2 instances running my application. I could do it in a few hours, leaving me the rest of the week to work on the application itself.

The same is true for other parts of the stack, I've got application frameworks dealing with all the boilerplate I used to write, front-end frameworks helping me build responsive UIs, and CSS frameworks to make it all look nice. I could do all of those things from scratch if there was some reason to do so, but why would I want to waste my time reinventing the wheel?

The end result of all this is that yes, I now do a job in which I do many things, some of which have previously been the entirety of jobs I've had, and I find it fantastic fun.

Although if you would like to hire someone who knows JavaScript, understands the CSS box model and data modeling, has written several application frameworks from scratch, and can build a local Linux server from a blank hard disk and a distro image, my email address is in my profile ;)

The thing with whipping a website with tools, templates, frameworks, libraries - WP is that at the end you don't get any traffic/visitors and it's useless and slow - most of the time.

We get so much queries from the small business owners why their site doesn't bring any new customers. It's all because of "templating". They end up pretty much with an "online business" card. The whole thing is a screw up from the ground up. It takes us months to get their website anywhere where it can be seen...most of the time it would be better to just do it from scratch. And at the end cheaper.

If you're serious about your business you will hire a team that can do the design, copy and SEO so that you can actually bring new clients at your door.

What do you mean by SEO that isn't covered, at some point, by high quality, well-researched design and copy?

I think the parent means that if you want to have a website that ranks well for "southern Texas dog grooming" you should start not from a nice looking Wordpress template but from "I need to produce weekly articles on dog grooming tips, make some videos that are easy to share on Facebook, ensure that the headlines are AB tested and ..."

Y'know, an organised approach the beating the competition

Very true. The piecing together of various open source libraries and templates is part of niche being filled by lower-cost freelancers that satisfies the needs of most low- to mid-tier projects that were previously contracted out to agencies.

I also feel like with the rise of the new Wix like or even Wix is killing the whole concept of making web design what it is. You can just slap stuff on now with 0 effort

I did some minor web stuff and found about 5 years ago that local SMEs and charities moved to using Wix, et al., removing my niche.

Similarly the web has become more complex and involved and expectations have increased, small scale web design doesn't work any more IMO.

Web design is cheap now. Eastern European and Southeast Asian talents can deliver at a fraction of a cost.

Next up is going to be mobile app design.

Additionally every other person in Silicon Valley is in a coding school or graduating from one.

Salaries are going to drop.

Programmers are the new lawyers.

> Programmers are the new lawyers.

It's more like white collars in general are the new blue collars.

Yup and many blue collar jobs, are going to be where people want to be. They'll see staring at a screen as entry level BS you have to drudge through life because you didn't learn to weld or repair manufacturing machinery.

> because you didn't learn to weld or repair manufacturing machinery.

Why would you, and how would you do it better, once robots can cheaply and perfectly do almost all the current blue collar jobs?

Maybe that's a good thing in the long term?

So many businesses (and other walks of life, like governments, public organisations, etc) can benefit from software that currently don't, making programmer-time more affordable will increase the amount of software they can get custom made for their needs and automate a lot of drudgery/improve efficiency.

Do you really want to be "more affordable"?

Personally I want to do high-quality work for people who know what it's worth...

I don't want to be more affordable, in the same way that I suspect autoworkers don't. But it might be beneficial to society in general.

Consider another aspect- agency costs. I recently asked for a quotation for some custom work in php. To generate pdf and zip files from database with a dashboard. Agencies quoted it as roughly US$ 340. That is steep.

So its good that a lot of help is available at sites like stackexchange. We completed the stuff ourselves.

Is it steep?

I suppose you paid the salaries for the person(s) doing that work in-house. Assuming your programmer's salary cost (~1.3x their gross salary) is $5000 per month and the median month having 20 work days, that price is about the equivalent of 1 day of work for your in-house programmer.

So that price needs to pay for 1 work day for the outsourced freelance programmer+overhead/profit margin for the company itself...Sounds reasonable to me.

Below a certain threshold it doesn't make sense to put in the time/effort to get a new client.

Actually, a 340$ quote from a US (or similar economies, like EU, Canada, AU, NZ) is a big red flag. No consulting business can really thrive charging that low, especially for non-recurring work.

It is quite literally not worth my time to get out of bed for less than 500$ unless the client is a frequently recurring client.

That's a reasonable salary. But when you have to add the overheads + profits i guess the piece work project will come out costly.

true i agree on the threshold principle. A minimum time slot or billing is reasonable. But as a client let's say thats just a slice of the entire web-project. And if this simple stuff takes $10/hour x 34 hours. It is steep.

Which programmer rates at $10/hour in salary cost? Here (Germany), this is just about minimum wage.

So even a cashier in the supermarket or a street cleaner earns about that or more.

EDIT: I guess the situation is different in India (just saw you're based there from your comment history), although I remember reading that even there developer salaries are slowly closing the gap with their western counterparts.

Like i said, I am not disputing the wage or salary as such. However with respect to a custom project it makes it costly. Again compared to having your own people do it using help from the net. As they may not be experts themselves.

I started writing this before having seen your other comment :)

Some development jobs are too small to be worth doing professionally. Assuming that wasn't a typo, I'm surprised any agency gave you a quote for a $340 job. Even my little consultancy business would need an extra zero before it was worth doing the paperwork to set up a new client in most cases, and our overheads are significantly lower than a lot of agencies would have.

This makes me think of the usefulness of interns, especially in niche areas.

Take a few per year. They'll enjoy the experience. And when mentioning niche areas, take them in skill-sets the team don't have, and have them teach the team. Example, for an engineering team: Graphic design, marketing, languages, etc..

Secondly we never could get anyone to do cURL stuff. In house we did a splendid job using online help and tech blogs. So my point is also there are gaps in web design agencies. Either they provide something with a premium cost. Or there is no one to take up custom projects.

Facebook is killing the low-end web design. Instead of hiring an agency for a small website, they just use a FB page. And before Facebook there were MySpace and AOL(albeit with a smaller world wide reach).

I read this article, or a version of it, four years ago when I quit my last job to go work at an agency. Since then business has only picked up.

It's not like these big name agencies employee hundreds of people. It's not like GE folding. So I don't think it's fair to judge the state of the industry mostly on the status of those companies.

I'm not sure how much you can really read into a couple of big name agencies being bought out by a couple of much bigger name companies with very deep pockets. Presumably the founders of the big name agencies are in their 40s by now, and perhaps they thought that taking a huge pile of money and accepting a position as "EVP of Design" at a huge company would be a pleasant way to spend a few years whilst they think of a new hobby to take up.

This article is stick in the weeds.

"Web designers" were an anomaly and stuck in the past. "Web design" of 1998-2010ish was mostly designers used to paper trying to translate it to the web (think complex use of huge tables to constrain presentation). Photoshop was the chief mockup tool tells you how out of touch they were.

The fact is that magazines had converged on a number of useful core ideas like black text on white pages, page numbers (mostly), text width constrained, breaking into multiple columns if necessary, etc. People who deviated too far from this ended up with "art" rather than a magazine. A lot of designers thought the web would allow them to go bonkers, yet at the same time had a command-and-control mindset that was straight out of paper-land (they'd tell you what size to make your browser in order to read their web page, for crime's sake).

So we ended up with some more conventions and are starting to have online (not just web) design that fits the medium -- e.g. finally we have reactive designs that aren't rigid table layouts that model paper so at least work to some degree on different sized devices.

Good riddance to those old fashioned losers. Anybody can now do an OK job using templates, and there is still room for experimentation. Hell, theres more experimentation, and a lot of it involves UI research, something anathema to magazine and poster designers!

"A few high-profile acquisitions coupled with a downturn in business has led to speculation that we are witnessing the end of an era"

A downturn? The article reaches a conclusion then supports it own conclusion with anecdotal evidence.

Maybe the amount of money spent in the design agency industry has increased but it's being spent at bigger firms.

Apps, social media presence and content marketing have all been eating away the 'website' budgets, while costs (with responsive design taking more time) have gone up. One way to stay relevant as an agency is being able to integrate all online chanels. Adapt or die.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com