Hey, Jeffrey, I wouldn’t have commented back to this except that I read the survey that came out recently, and it made me think of this exchange. I don’t think I ever saw the comment you made above about ‘being nice’, so I was a bit surprised when I came back to this today.

For the record, no offense was meant. The thing is, you are ‘making the rules’ by choosing which information is surveyed, there is no way to get around that. However, my attempt at a little humor thrown in with the criticism wasn’t intended to sound unappreciative of the work that went into this, that is for sure.

I don’t care for surveys much, given how flawed the information gleaned often is, and when I take one, I get frustrated when I can see from a distance how its construction [or lack thereof] is going to impact the results. I know you said that it did in fact branch, but for myself, it felt like I didn’t really get to participate. And then I thought about all the other people I know who run their businesses the same way, some of whom probably took your survey, and hence my frustration and comment.

I wouldn’t have taken your survey if I didn’t think it was important to do so. I think it is very important for the web world [and those who care about it] to know who is doing what… and if possible, why.

But do web professionals care who is filing which tax return? I’m going to wager not, and that in making the choice to leave out the info mentioned above, you definitely took a wrong turn in your survey. I think we care a lot more about how we are each running our businesses, in addition to all the other info. But I really did not come back to beat a dead horse. You seem to agree in your reply/comment, so I hope we’ll see that breakdown of info in future surveys. I’m sure you all learned quite a bit in this first edition.

When I give presentations on the new design and related Usability tests which I solely plannned and organized, I have been instructed by my director to credit the web team as the ones driving these projects. In this case it’s just to coverup a bad situatiion. Because the web team is absolutely clueless, they still code tables (asthey don’t know how to code excluisvely using CSS) and depend on WYSIWYG applications and are unaware about usabiity, webstandards and accessbility issues.

As one of the other posters mentioned this is a “cross-disciplinary expertise”. I am a better front end designer, because of my Marketing and Communications background. I am able apply user centered design practices and adhere to experience design tenets as well as plan usability tests because I understand the communications channels and brand identity and developing M&C strategy.

Instead of identifying our selves as web specialists may be we need to adopt hybrid titles (so we can be readiliuy identified), because to be a web specialist you must understand more than coding. And the organizations that employ these hidden workers need to credit them and create hybrid offices with blended teams which produced help the organization rather than separate departments which are just ineffective.

It’s difficult when we ourselves cannot decide on who we are. Is the person who designs purely in Photoshop or Fireworks a web designer? What about the person who takes that composition and turns it into CSS?

What’s a developer? Someone who only deals with (X)HTML and CSS? Or someone who is good with web server management, Object-oriented systems and design in PHP, ASP, .Net, Java, JavaFX, XUL, XAML, C++, XSLT, XSL-FO, XPATH, WSDL, SOAP, XLink, Xpointer, XQuery, RDF, RSS, WAP, XML Schema, Perl, Python, JSP, JavaScript, Coldfusion, Ruby on Rails, HTTP, (X)HTML, Accessibility, business technologies and strategies, workflow, collaboration etc (have I made my point yet ;) )? I think the reality of it though as we are still fracturing: it is no longer to be jack of all trades of various web programming languages and be good at all of them. As individuals, we need to pick a specialisation and accept that. That’s not to say we can’t pick up other skills or change our specialisation at a later date.

This challenge can be overcome by standing tall together. This is now happening in Australia with the formation of WIPA and AWIA. I have great hopes that one day they will start to define what a web professional is (in an inclusive way) and the role and skill sets of various sub-classifications (designers, developers, information architects, etc).

This is something that they could distribute to HR staff who need to recruit but don’t understand the field. It could be handy for educational institutions who want to equip their graduates with the important skills, and for ourselves in our pay scales (that is one part of the discussion that seems to be missing).

I was hired as a web designer for a 200 person firm by their IT director. There’s only ever been one ‘web person’ and though I had written many a perl and javascript and can code xhtml/css in my sleep and was quite happy doing GUI design, I found out that I was woefully unqualified for what the job really was. Intranet maintenance and design turned out to be fixing and expanding custom built web & desktop applications built in flash, .net, asp and some really bad vbscript (client-side!). One of my first projects as the ‘web designer’ was to collect survey data via web form and port it into the back-end of their accounting software. (I didn’t even know what Enterprise Manager was! Ha!)

A few thousand pages of SQL, database design ASP and .NET tutorials later I had the HR assistant reorder my business cards, changing the title from ‘Webmaster’ to ‘Web Developer’. Not that I feel fully qualified yet, but at least it reflect the level of what I do every day.

The point is – despite several interviews, including all the IT staff, no one knew the difference between a web designer and a programmer, much less and info architect. It’s taken some work, but I think I’m slowly educating staff, including my managers, and to their credit, they’re compensating me nicely and letting me take whatever training I want.

p.s. The dark days have passed, now that I’ve proven my skills they’re letting me develop on Apache (as long as I setup and admin my own servers!). Learning ROR this fall :o)

Furthermore, it’s clear that there is very, very little “standardized” Web education at the post-secondary level beyond technical/vocational schools or self-instruction, if you go to a lot of end-of-year shows at graphic design schools where the ‘web site’ requirement is usually to do a flakey Flash portfolio.

I would love to see more of this integrated into the curriculum in secondary schools.

Good HTML requires good knowledge of the structure of an article. This is a language skill as much as a web skill. Why not teach it alongside poetry and prose?

Web design is a graphic art skill. It has its limitations, like chalks and watercolours do. Some pupils will warm to it and others shy away. Make it a module in the curriculum.

However, we have a problem in that only the IT teacher will have a clue about any of this, probably for a generation to come.

Mainly, I’ve been called the, “IT Guy”…

Yes, we need a voice!

Martin Espericueta