Findings from the Web Design Survey, 2009

by ALA Staff

20 Reader Comments

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  1. I have a tool online at http://evc-cit.info/ala_survey2010 that may help people extract other combinations of data (such as hours worked by region, as mentioned by sondz above).

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  2. Is it just me or is programming one the 40’s way too low? I know it’s a fast-paced job and you have to study more than a layer but, even so, scares me to see so little people developing on that age range.

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  3. I am a black female from the Caribbean island of Barbados.  I am making the assumption that the Caribbean is lumped under South America.  The statistics are indeed very interesting and many of them are quite accurate for our region. 

    In the Caribbean, we tend to be chief cooks and bottle washers, meaning that even if you have a title of web developer, it is expected that you have the majority of the claimed skills as well.

    We have challenges with salaries and costs of web development work as well as with skill gaps.  One example of this is that salaries in the industry tend to be low but costs of training are very high(this is due to lack of training opportunities within the region). 

    Don’t even get me started on biases.

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  4. The analysis of the bias questions sounds one-sided. This could be a result of the question summary, unfortunately I can’t find a link to the full questions to verify this.

    For example, a question is titled “Perceived gender bias by gender” and the analysis states “Again, women perceive that gender bias has hurt them professionally to a much greater degree than men…” Would it not be more accurate to say “A much greater percentage of women than men perceive that there is gender bias in the workplace.”? If somebody states they believe there is bias, how do you know which way they believe the bias goes? Is there scope to say you believe there is bias towards your own sex/race/etc?

    I for example believe that there is gender bias towards hiring women over equivalent men in many larger companies. There should be scope for a respondant to express such a view.

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  5. “ethnic bias — again, let’s ask the tiny minority of folks who aren’t caucasian what they think.”

    “let’s ask the tiny minority of folks who aren’t caucasian”

    “tiny minority”

    Because, in reality, there is no ethnic bias?  Uh, ok.

    In any event, it’s a survey and surveys aren’t about “accuracy”.  The Ideal Mean is a b!tch.

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  6. It’s interesting to see that the numbers of people excited by the field dropped in 2009, as previously commented. In the UK the web is getting stronger and last year, as you may or may not know, internet advertising took over from TV advertising for revenue share. The male/female issue is very interesting as we are in the proces of developing an online store for a company which has a web presence, and whose directors thought that they were being targeted by a male audience, so all their marketing went toward male imagery etc. We did some research using Alexa and other information sources and it was found that the demographic was actually women working from home! We are now targeting a jointly male and female market with the new site design!

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  7. Post is definitely interesting. But I do not agree with one point wherein you have said that the world has yet to pay attention to the people involved in providing web solutions like web designers, developers, information architects, marketers, or other professionals. How? I don’t think so this is the case with us. Please elaborate more on this.

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  8. “¦ What no one got the Strong Bad reference? Just a bit disappointed in the button that reads “View The Survey Findings”. It’s really not a big deal, just didn’t think it fits with the classy feel of ALA. Now I’ll go read the results.

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  9. Interesting read. Thanks for putting this together.

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  10. I’m not so surprised by the gender ratio. But I am intrigued as to how this might change over time (already?)

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