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Comment by ben_jones | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

> 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 ;)

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.

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