Blog Home: Growth of the Website Design Industry

Found this gem in an old Seth Godin post. He says: The real growth and development and the foundations for the next era are laid during the chaotic times, the times that come after the leaders have stumbled.

This can be seen clearly in the growth of the Internet and the website design industry.

In December, 1990, there was one website online, info.cern.ch, created by Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web. The number grew slowly. Two years later, in Dec. 1992, only 50 websites were online. It took five years, until June 1995, before the number of websites on the Internet passed 20,000.

Then the dot-com boom hit. The web grew from 23,500 sites in June ’95 to over 10,000,000 by spring 2000. Website development became one of the fastest growing industries in the world.

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  • In 1995 there were fewer than 1,000 web development companies in the USA.
  • By 2005 there were over 30,000 website design companies in the U.S. alone.
  • By 2008, that number surged to 50,000.
  • The USA Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts a growth rate of 13% per year until 2018.

The Future of Website Design

The web isn’t getting any smaller.

  • In July, 2010, Netcraft’s Web Study identified 205,714,253 unique domain based websites.
  • In 2008, Google passed 1,000,000,000,000 (1 trillion) individual pages in their index.
  • Forrester predicts that ecommerce will continue to grow at a steady pace of 10% per year.

Skilled website designers find the most effective way to get commercial messages across using color, type, illustration, photography and layout. While advances in technology and content management systems have made basic website design easier for the novice, other technologies such as interactive media, mobile design and search engine optimization overwhelm the novice webmaster.

As the web continues to grow in size and technological offerings, and the competition for business increases, the demand for skilled website developers that can deliver a competitive edge isn’t likely to decrease.

 

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August 10, 2010 | Filed Under (it's all) marketing 

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