They can't make a living because Wix, Squarespace, Facebook pages, and Amazon shops are now considered "good enough" by most of the middle market (small and medium businesses), so there is not much need now for custom work in that segment.

This was not the case even 5 years ago. The tools are now out there to make a reasonable-looking website with minimal training or experience. Sure, it looks very much like the other sites made with that tool, but (apparently) most businesses don't care.

Custom web dev will continue to exist only at the low and high ends -- hobbyist websites made by people who enjoy the process, and a few large, complex specialist sites.

> This was not the case even 5 years ago.

People were saying exactly the same thing in relation to FrontPage 20 years ago. After that it was Dreamweaver. WordPress. Wix. etc.

The tools for people to go off and do it themselves have been with us for a very long time, and they've only ever squeezed out the very bottom of the market. The types of organisations that DIY appeals to aren't in the market and don't have the budget for an average developer, and the organisations that spend money on developers wouldn't consider DIY.

But the tools, and the marketing of those tools, have vastly improved in the last ~5 years. Or are you telling me dreamweaver's wysiwyg editor was the pinnacle of development..

Yes, the tools have vastly improved over the past five years – but the whole industry has. The tools a freelancer uses have improved dramatically as well. What a freelancer can achieve in a given amount of time has improved dramatically too. And clients' expectations are growing correspondingly.

The whole industry is moving forward. The bottom of the freelance market 20 years ago was plain static pages and that's what FrontPage competed with. The bottom of the freelance market now is a content-managed dynamic site and that's what Facebook pages compete with.

You just made my point. Not all freelancers choose to improve their tool-set. Therefore they fall behind where, like you said, the whole industry moves forward.

If all you are arguing is that people who don't make any effort to improve their work will struggle to keep up with the rest of the industry, then yes, I agree with that. But that doesn't seem to have been your point until now.

Fair point, I probably jumped the gun with that statement.

I think the fact that we are posting this on a thread about how freelance web designers have had increasing difficulty finding work over the past few years is evidence to the contrary. It's no longer just the very bottom of the market that uses these tools. They're now mainstream and have captured the mid-market.

> It's no longer just the very bottom of the market that uses these tools. They're now mainstream and have captured the mid-market.

I don't see this. Take a look at the Wix testimonials, for instance: http://www.wix.com/stories/ – they are individuals and tiny businesses, not the mid-market.

I think what has changed is that now there is less work, not that there is none, what the article was trying to point out, and what I'm seeing in all these comments if you read through the lines is that a lot of the work has been moved in house.

Previously you contracted a freelancer to put together your website piece by piece, now, thanks to improvements to the tools available you contract a freelancer to customise a cms for you. You then hire a marketer to manage it going forward.

The work is still there, it's just the freelance work has dried up because you no longer need them to put copy on the site.

Right, no-one cares that the website of the plumber in your town looks the same as that of the plumber in the next town, because those guys aren't competing with each other.

I'd go even further. No one cares about the website of the plumber. Full stop. People find the plumber on Yelp!, Google Places, Facebook and other business profile pages around the web. None of those require any design work to bring in business.

There's still a disconnect on the part of some small business owners...they think that their website is important. But a lot of them are realizing that nearly all of their inbound leads are coming from other sources and that the website is just an expense that isn't really necessary.

Just for a counterpoint, about a year ago I did a landing page and accompanying marketing campaign for a friend of mine who runs a small landscaping business in Pittsburgh. With Squarespace and a couple days spent on a branding strategy, his site was head and shoulders above any competitor.

After a small investment on his part in advertising, we were generating many more leads than he could handle at a very good ROI--seemingly because the nice site was doing a good job differentiating him. So at least in his case, having a decent website did bring a real competitive advantage.

FWIW, my observation came from working on a scheduling product used by ~40k small businesses. I think what you've noticed is just how successful advertising can be. We've seen clients have similar success with Facebook and Yelp! ad campaigns, all without a homepage. One customer got over 30 new customers (expected LTV of over $1k per customer) in one month of Yelp! spend.

Exactly, web design agencies should pivot or include (and heavily promote) ad management.

I got to see the numbers of a mid-sized web design agency, and they were really an ad agency, but they didn't realize it (and didn't market accordingly).

Frankly, because "web designer" is, more or less, an obsolete profession.[1]

The web is substantially more complex than it was even a decade ago. There are way more apps, platforms, and experiences to develop for—more and more companies have their very existence tied directly to their digital technology investments.

For those companies, there is no reason to hire a "web designer" (understood as someone who knows design and a bit of programming). They hire UI/UX designers and developers.

On the flip side, for businesses where technology is not fundamental to the competitive advantage the tools have become commoditized. A decade ago, they might have hired a "web designer" to build out a basic WordPress site. Now they can just use Squarespace.

If you can actually do web development, there's more work than there has ever been. Software has just eaten the middle out.

[1] No offense. I've made plenty of money doing web design work in the past.

That maybe true but those who have work won't be emailing asking for help. You are still only sampling a skewed group.

We use freelancers a lot to supliment our inhouse skillset which I think is the industry standard

Totally industry standard. I've been one of such freelancers in the past. If we were going to boil this down to a scientific dip sample, then yes - I'm sampling a skewed group. Since we don't have any means of doing this, I'm simply writing about my experience of what I'm hearing across, what I would consider, a broad spectrum of our industry. Judging by my inbox of relieved freelancers/industry professionals today, my post is resonating with a whole subset of people who have been quietly suffering thinking there is something wrong with what they're doing/their work; when it's how the industry does business now, that's changed.

What I'm seeing in mobile developer meetups is a shift toward freelancing. Basically, web development is shifting from freelancers towards tools & in-house maintenance programmers. Mobile development is shifting from startup founders to freelancers. The startup scene is shifting from mobile to IoT (hardware), VR, and wearables.

In other words, the technology cycle is coming around again. We went through the same thing in the early 2000s, as it became nearly impossible to get a non-maintenance job as a desktop software developer and the web freelance market took off (just on the heels of the dot-com bubble bursting). Also, just as the shift in web-development from well-funded dot-coms to individual freelancers and small startups led to the "Web 2.0" renaissance, we might see a "Mobile 2.0" renaissance with a new generation of technologies (Swift, MBaaS, Dagger, RxJava/RxCocoa) that changes how we do mobile development.

(I'm not sure we'll see a "Web 3.0" renaissance - "Desktop 1.0" was the PC, CP/M, MS-DOS, Apple Basic, etc., and "Desktop 2.0" was Macintosh and Win32 development, but what was supposed to be "Desktop 3.0" - OS X, desktop Linux, and .NET on the client - remained fairly niche specialties. I wonder if React/Polymer will go the same way.)

I don't think anyone is questioning whether your work resonates with a whole subset of people; I think we're questioning whether conferences and a full inbox are all the evidence we need to accept broad pronouncements about the state of an industry.

Unless she's heard from 384+ people

It's still anecdotal, unless those 384 people were chosen in a statistically rigorous way from the total population.

The number of people that are sending emails asking the author for work is increasing. This could be because more people are working in the industry - but I'd guess that this has been factored in.

The second point backing this up was the reduced number of conferences. Assuming there were more people who have work then there should be more conferences - even if there were more people out of work.

Its not just web designers. Its SEO, custom database, email marketing and other areas related to SME websites. Website content have become more complex and expensive at a time when the western economies are taking a hit. You did not mention the low ball outsourcing which is significant also.