It seems that every day another article comes out telling you how bad the economy is.\u00a0 I do so hope that you weren’t banking on this trend somehow passing web design by.<\/p>\n
A joint study commissioned by Heart Internet<\/a>, a UK Web Host, and Design Shack<\/a>, a web design blog, puts any hopes of that to rest.\u00a0 It found that 80 percent of web designers find work to be either as hard or harder to come by than it was one year ago.\u00a0 With less free capital to be allocated towards redesigning existing sites and the existence of more and more free options, this is a situation that does not look to correct itself any time soon.<\/p>\n The web designer who wants to stay in this profession needs to find ways to ride out this storm.\u00a0 Here are a few suggestions:<\/p>\n Write for new platforms<\/strong><\/p>\n If there’s any technology that is advancing faster than all of the rest of technology that intersects with it, it is within the smart phone realm.\u00a0 New pads and phones and tablets are flying off the shelves.\u00a0 What isn’t flying with it are the applications and programming meant to make use of their specific setups.<\/p>\n This is reflected in another poll from Heart Internet which stated that only 50% of web designers consider writing their code for use on mobile applications<\/a>.\u00a0 Well, there you go: start writing for them and you’ve now got a leg up on half of your competitors.\u00a0 Of course, this is a lot of changing standards to keep up with.\u00a0 It’s not easy; but in this economy, neither is anything that you need to do to stay ahead.\u00a0 With more and more shopping being done from a hand-held device, this is a swelling market demographic that cannot be ignored.<\/p>\n Fill in the gaps<\/strong><\/p>\n And it probably goes without saying that this same rule also goes for all of the old services that you never got around to learning.\u00a0 Can you write for Unix, Linux and Windows servers?\u00a0 Did you learn Flash, Shockwave, X3D?\u00a0 Heck, learn Linden while you’re at it.\u00a0 It may seem absurd or frivolous, but those Second Life dollars can become real dollars, and who even knows where those are going?<\/p>\n