Start-ups
The web, at barely fifteen years old, is still an open field for innovation and entrepreneurial zeal. This is in a large-part due to the low up-front costs in starting up a web-based business. The initial investment of many web-based businesses is relatively low, compared to traditional businesses, while the potential rewards, given the huge potential market of web visitors, are ever-increasing. You don’t need to buy any raw materials to set up shop online – you don’t even need to be in the same country to which you sell products or services. You just need some understanding of web development and a sharp mind for opportunity. Of course, it goes without saying that most start-ups fail.
Start-ups, when first starting out, will generally be low on cash. To get cash, they will usually have to raise money from investors. To raise money from investors, they will usually have to show investors the promise of what they are developing. So, as a generalization, start-ups will often ask people to work for less money than they can make elsewhere so that they can keep their overhead low and develop their technology enough to attract investment, at which point they will hopefully be able to pay people adequately. Instead of cash, they will often offer employee stock options, meaning that employees have equity and stand to gain (sometimes hugely) from any future company profits.
To sum it up: make sure that whatever you stand to gain is worth the lower pay and higher risk than other forms of employment.
Agencies
Web developers need not be entrepreneurs. Since the late 90′s, interactive agencies have popped up left and right to bring the marketing and advertising skills perfected at ad agencies of the past into the new domain of the internet. Many of these agencies were originally print ad agencies which have transitioned into the web.
Going with the old ad agency model, these businesses have transformed the originally ad-hoc process of building websites into a results-oriented industrial assembly line process. As in any industrial manufacture, web or interactive agencies divide interactive accounts into specialized work roles, where each person plays a small part in building and promoting brands on the web. And it’s not just agencies – any medium to large corporation will have a web department handling a variety of functions, often in the same streamlined process (but by no means always in this way.)
Agency work is a good way to experience a wide variety of different types of websites within a very short period of time. Agencies also have a regular flow of employees going in and out, meaning that it is sometimes easier to find work with agencies than with other, less dynamic, companies. The pay is usually decent and standardized.
Large commercial brands will often hire agencies not because they are especially creative, but simply for the reason that they are reputable, large, experienced, usually heavily insured, and familiar with dealing with many types of clients. Agencies often subcontract their work to more specialized firms who do design or development for them. There is a whole feeder industry surrounding agencies.
Careers
Here is a short list of web-related jobs that one often sees advertised at interactive agencies, corporate web departments, and web design shops:
- Creative Director
- Interactive Director
- Product Manager
- Project Manager
- Web Marketer
- Web Producer
- Account Manager
- Web Strategist
- Content Strategist
- Web Marketer
- Media Planner
- Media Buyer
- Web Analytics Specialist
- Community Manager
- Information Architect
- User-Experience Designer
- Web Developer
- Front-End Developer (client side)
- Back-End Developer (server side)
- Flash Developer
- Flex Developer
- Web Designer
- Graphic Designer
- Q/A Engineer
Pay
A contract web developer can make anywhere between $15-$150/hour. On the low end, you find newly minted developers with very little experience, as well as outsourcers from countries with a low cost of living. On the high end, you get experienced consultants with years and years of experience and a proven track record of results with many former big-name clients.
As full-time employees, web developers can again make anywhere along a wide range of salaries: from $30k to $180k. It depends, as with anything else, on experience and knowledge of the industry, as well as the type of company you work for. Non-profits and start-ups tend to pay less than interactive agencies, but they often attempt make up for that gap with perks such as interesting work, good benefits, idealistic projects, stock options, etc.
What to charge your first client
Not a lot. Explain to your first few clients that you are trying to gain experience, and be fair in your pricing. You want to be able to develop accurate estimates of how long various types of jobs would take you, and price accordingly. But to start with, things will take you a long time, and so it may be better to price your work as a flat fee for the entire project, rather than by the hour. Give your clients a break, so long as they are lenient with you.
Once you get comfortable with how quickly and well you are able to complete jobs, which will happen sooner than you think, start raising your prices.
Recruiters
Many technology and design recruiters and staffing firms exist to match job applicants up with companies in need of specialized help. You should be aware that recruiters generally charge clients much more than they pay their employees. It is not unusual for them to take a 20-50% cut. So if you are hired by a recruiter to work a job for $60/hour, you should not be surprised to learn that the recruiter is charging the client $100/hour and keeping $40 for themselves for every hour you work.
If you use a W-4 tax form with the recruiter, where they withhold taxes on your behalf, they may provide insurance, retirement plans, and other perks similar to those of a full-time employment. However, if you have a corp-to-corp relationship and file your income from the recruiter on a 1099 form or similar, you do not get those perks, and you may be able to use that fact to negotiate a slightly higher rate since the recruiter’s expenses in hiring you will be significantly less.
Jobs sites
There is no replacement for networking anywhere and everywhere. However, there are some popular jobs sites as well. Here is a list of a few I know of:
http://newyork.craigslist.org
http://hotjobs.com
http://monster.com
http://dice.com
http://simplyhired.com/
http://elance.com
Trends
E-commerce is still in its infancy. To those of us who have ordered all our holiday presents online for years, it may seem like e-commerce is a saturated market. But in fact, industry analysts predict massive growth in e-commerce in the coming years as more and more businesses move onto the web and new markets open up as more and more people become web-enabled.
For years, the industry has also chattered a lot about convergence – the meeting of markets like e-commerce, mobile devices, publishing, telephony, television, and web marketing. With the explosive growth of web-enabled phones like Blackberry, iPhone, Android devices, VoIP, Kindle, and P2PTV, the web as we previously knew it is becoming more and more intertwined with the mobile device and with other broadcast technologies. This may explain the enthusiasm with which investors and technologists embrace otherwise inconsequential products like Twitter which seamlessly bridge the divide between web and mobile.
An interesting artifact of the lowering cost of mobile and web-based technologies is the developing world’s embrace of mobile phones, and SMS (text messages). Since many developing countries lack the telecommunications infrastructure required for high speed land lines for internet connectivity, and given that mobile phones in many places other than the US are very cheap to begin using, more and more people are communicating and accessing information through mobile phones and SMS, which work on cellular and satellite networks. These cell towers and satellite systems bypass the more traditional methods of accessing the internet that we in the US are accustomed to, such as DSL, cable, or T1 lines. This difference in access may have interesting implications for the development of the web for a more global audience.
The use of online technology for education is also growing every year as more schools offer distance learning programs to attract wider student bodies. And childhood education has embraced technologies like online resources and electronic whiteboards that allow students to interact with a teacher’s console using handheld devices as they find that under-performing students fare better when taught with technological devices.
Google makes money almost entirely through advertising. Almost every product and innovation they release is geared towards bringing more traffic to their search engine and analyzing traffic on all of their sites for metrics which can be used to sell targeted advertisements to their users. By providing extremely userful applications like Google Maps and GMail, Google drives users towards their search engine and their advertisements while collecting data on users’ interests and habits to better refine their targeted advertisements.
Web Advertising
Web advertising is traditonally priced in one of two ways: CPM or CPA. CPM stands for Cost-Per-Thousand – it means the price an advertiser is willing to pay to have 1,000 people view their advertisement. CPA stands for Cost-Per-Action, sometimes also known as Cost-Per-Acquisition, or Cost-Per-Conversion.
It used to be that advertisers paid sites like Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google on a CPM basis to run their ads. However, in recent years, advertisers have seen a drop in the number of people who view an ad and then actually click on that ad. The click-through rate of web advertisements has dropped so much that today, only a few tenths of a percent of people will actually click ads they see on the major web portals. Estimates vary, but click-through rates for web ads are said to be anywhere between 0.1% to 0.3%.
So many advertisers have switched to the CPA model, where the amount they pay depends on a more concrete metric, such as how many viewers perform a particular action that results from the advertisement. An “action” in this context could be anything, such as registering for a site, signing up to receive more information, or buying something. The term “conversion rate” refers to the percentage of viewers of an ad who end up taking such a follow-up action. Web marketers spend a significant amount of their time worrying about these numbers.
Targeted advertisement is all the rage, since a site that can collect the habits and preferences of a visitor can then run advertisements that are more likely to appeal to that visitor. They can therefore charge more of the advertisers since the click-through and conversion rates are likely to be higher.
Facebook & Twitter
Nobody really knows how Facebook, Twitter, or similar popular social network services will become profitable if they ever do. But the major social networks have hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions of users, which means they have a huge number of eyeballs looking at their sites every day. The potential for advertising revenue to those eyeballs is great, especially considering how many users have voluntarily indicated preferences and affiliations with their favorite brands. Facebook is thought to perhaps be already be profitable based on its heavy advertising. This may explain some social networks’ high stock valuations. However, such companies, which seem to rely on buzz and the good-will of their users, are extremely wary of alienating those users by overrunning the sites with advertisements. Hence you will see them trying to advertise in roundabout ways, such as Facebook’s Beacon service, or selling user data to third parties rather than using it themselves for targeted advertisements.
By offering additional services like mail, applications, photo sharing, and such, Facebook is hoping to prevent people from abandoning their site in favor of the next big thing, as happened to its social network predecessors like Friendster and to a lesser extent, MySpace. The more effort people put into curating their online personalities and profiles, the less likely they are to abandon the site and thereby waste all that effort. I would not be surprised to see Twitter start doing the same.
Some people argue that Facebook’s valuation may be an indicator of investors’ faith in its viability as a “Web OS”, an operating system that runs entirely on the web and upon which you can build more sophisticated web-enabled social networked software products. Maybe the future will see Facebook transform into the next Microsoft.
Mobile
It should be obvious that the mobile web is the next big thing.