Chapter 1
In This Chapter
Discovering why web development has so many jobs
Understanding why companies care about web development
Figuring out what are some of the main kinds of sites
Seeing which jobs go with which kinds of sites
Web development is the largest and fastest-growing area of employment today. Web development includes technically oriented people who write computer programs, graphic designers who never see a line of computer code, content and marketing experts who concentrate on the visual and verbal appeal of a page, and many more experts and dabblers.
The ways in which people work in web development are as many and varied as the kind of work that is covered by the web development umbrella. Many people work traditional “day jobs,” but you will also see just as many people in a garage startup working 80 hours a week, contractors, consultants, part-timers, and people who will give you crucial insights that save your project just because you were good enough to buy them lunch.
The reason for the many and varied job descriptions, and the many and varied ways of working, in web development is simple: The web is the greatest creative canvas in human history. The rapid and continuing growth of the web is driven by the appeal of simple combinations of words and pictures, abetted now by multimedia, laid out in easy to scan and attractive ways, and offering users functionality from the simplest task — reading a newspaper article, say — to a dashboard that displays the operational status of a multibillion-dollar factory (or a multibillion-dollar war). Art, music, photography, creative writing, commerce — almost anything that people do is delivered by the web, or supported by content and functionality delivered by the web.
Only some of the work roles that support the wonders of the web are considered “web development jobs.” Here are a few descriptive phrases to help narrow down what we can consider part of the web development world:
We could go on, but this list captures the wide and fast-changing world of web development as well as any brief description can. And this list helps us to identify the one common element that is the most important in distinguishing the web development world, and the most crucial characteristic of the many, many people who thrive in it.
The common element in web development is change; most areas of web development are changing quickly. Even where technical standards have settled down, how and even why we do things in web development continue to evolve. Styles come and go, such as web pages with big images and few words; needs change, as with the unrelenting growth of mobile.
And the most important characteristic of successful web development people is the secret to accommodating this rapid pace of change: a love of learning. It’s great for a web developer to love change in and of itself, but what helps her thrive in that fast-changing world is the desire to swim better in these fast-flowing currents by picking up new information, new skills, new attitudes, and new ways of working.
The fact that you’re reading this book shows that you probably have this core characteristic, this love of learning. You aren’t happy with a top ten list or a brief video clip when you face a serious issue, and a big opportunity, such as moving over to, or moving up in, the world of web development. Of course, you will probably look at many top ten lists and video clips as well; there are several of each associated with or linked to from this book. But, as a reader of this book, you’re willing to do some heavy lifting to understand this still-new world. Welcome!
Web development matters because the web matters in so many ways that we could take this whole chapter just to briefly describe them all.
Here’s one way of describing how important the web has become, and how quickly it has grown in importance. One of us, Bud Smith, was working for Apple Computer in 1994. (Which, luckily, was nothing like 1984 — that’s an old Apple joke.)
Smith started hearing about something called the World Wide Web, and seeing Mosaic, an early web browser, on developers’ screens. He quickly pulled together a book proposal, and he was soon the proud co-author of an early web book, Creating Web Pages For Dummies (Wiley). This book went to nine editions and is still in print more than 20 years later. That’s about how long the web has been known to most people, as usage grew and grew and grew.
In that time, the web has become ubiquitous in the developed world, and commonly used in the developing world. Facebook alone, which started out as a website and is now powered by mobile apps, has more than 1.3 billion monthly average users.
The web is now a major source of information, entertainment, commerce, computing capability, and more, and growing fast in all these areas every year. About ten percent of all retail sales go through the web in the developed world, and steady growth continues. Websites change all the time, and many mobile apps — a very fast-growing area of software — are simply repurposed, and simplified, websites.
Books, magazines, newspapers, the telephone, movies, and television are all important communications and entertainment media today, and all of them, in their traditional forms, are being disrupted by the web. That is, all of them partly depend on the web as infrastructure and distribution — and all of them see the web as competition. And one can hardly emphasize enough that this disruption is continuing year after year after year.
Also, none of the other media listed is also a front end for software. Inventor and entrepreneur Marc Andreesen famously said, “Software is eating the world.” This means that more and more of the things that people do are being converted to software. And more and more of that software is being presented to people through websites and apps. (See the sidebar “Is app development the same as web development?” for more.)
For an example, consider Amazon (www.amazon.com). Amazon stores and presents user reviews for an immense range of products. It displays a different version of its home page to you based on your past purchases. And it makes recommendations to you based on your past purchases and the content you’re currently looking at. It also lets you buy with a single click, if you wish. (This feature is almost unique to Amazon, which protects its intellectual property zealously.)
All this functionality is based in software — often quite consequential software. Amazon’s recommendation engine, for instance, is a major software engineering project in its own right, protected by patents and trade secrets just like other advanced technology.
What’s important here is that all this technology is presented through a web interface and is considered to be part of this market-leading website. As a supporting point, making a website work better is causing new and improved technology to be developed on a rapid and constant basis.
So you have the fastest-growing medium ever, and one that is at least as consequential as any other medium, ever. And it was invented and became popular not much more than a couple of decades ago. The size and importance of the web, its innovative use and creation of technology, and its incredibly rapid growth are the core reasons why web development is so important.
Apps are also pretty specialized, given that they work on small screens and have limited functionality. Overall, app development is not the same as web development, but many apps are repurposed websites, including significant functionality, and web development jobs can include app development. Companies that specialize in app development are likely to hire people with web development backgrounds, and then teach them a few additional skills so they can help turn out killer apps instead.
Web development jobs are one of the largest new categories, and one of the fastest-growing categories, in employment. For the U.S., the Bureau of Labor Statistics says that there are roughly 150,000 positions at this writing. Over the next decade, employment is expected to grow about 20 percent here. The main driver of job growth in web development is e-commerce. In many retail categories, about 10 percent of all sales are completed online. That percentage is expected to roughly double over the next decade.
However, there are more web development jobs in the job listings than for other kinds of positions, even those with more total employees. Why is this? A few reasons spring to mind:
Companies care tremendously about web development. The reasons are complicated, numerous, and differ from one company to another, but there are many common themes.
Web development needs differ from organization to organization — and, within an organization, often from quarter to quarter. That’s because the web is protean — it can do so many things.
Following is a brief and partial list of different types of websites. It’s important that you recognize these types of sites because the types of job roles they require will vary significantly.
Every company of any consequence today has at least basic “brochureware” website. This website does the same thing as a brochure that the same company might hand out at a trade show or a job fair, or give to investors or press people:
Brochureware sites were developed because it’s easier and cheaper to put this kind of information on a website than it is to write, lay out, and print up a brochure, and then get it in the hands of the person who needs it — which usually takes precious time. The people seeking information doesn’t have to wait to get a brochure, try to remember where they put it, or worry about whether it’s up-to-date. They just find the website and look for themselves.
Brochureware sites also serve another purpose — they allow a company to say, “Of course we have a website.” Brochureware sites often reflect a company that hasn’t thought through how it can really take best advantage of the web.
Figure 1-1 shows a discussion of brochureware sites on the National Institutes of Health site, where it compares them to interactive websites. You can visit it at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3096269/.
Websites are commonly used to sell, support, and arrange for service for products. If a typical company isn’t looking to do these things online, it probably should.
When Marc Andreessen says that “software is eating the world,” this is what he means. It’s very often easier, cheaper, and more effective to do at least part of any function a company does online, supported by software and available to everyone. Just for one example: A company may have a product that’s very hard to choose and fit online, such as shoes. (We know shoes are sold online, but they’re still sold in person a lot too, for these reasons.)
So say that you’ve decided to only sell shoes in person. Well, you’re not done. A customer who has purchased your great shoes and received your great service may want to buy another pair of shoes like the ones she bought before. If she hasn’t grown or otherwise changed, the exact same shoes will work for her. A website is a great way to help her reorder them.
Or, perhaps the customer is really excited about her shoes and wants to join a club or have an ongoing discussion about them. The online world is a great place to do that.
Brochureware sites for large companies can be very extensive, with tons of information. But in these cases, it’s even more likely that the company is missing opportunities to do more online.
If a company hires you to work on a brochureware site, think through whether it’s missing opportunities to do more. You may be able to expand the job opportunity — but, if the company is too stuck in the mud, you may decide you don’t want to work for the company at all.
What kinds of website developers are needed for a brochureware site? Here are a few descriptive characterizations, although one person can have more than one skill:
A database-driven site can be almost any kind of site, but at minimum it’s a step up in technical complexity from a brochureware site. In a database-driven site, each page that’s shown in the site is generated from a database call.
Look at a site for a newspaper such as The New York Times. The Times has too many stories that change too fast to write separate HTML and CSS code for each web page that displays a new story. Instead, the story is placed in a database, and the data is then retrieved when someone wants to see the story.
With this kind of flexible web page, ads, recommended stories, and other content on the web page can also be generated from database calls. The website becomes far more flexible; at the same time, an entire new level of complexity is introduced because it becomes much harder to know, or track, just who among the visitors to your site has seen exactly what.
A database-driven site typically uses a content management system (CMS): a tool for people to enter and link information that will appear on the website. A good CMS makes a lot of people’s jobs easier, but it’s also the case that, between the CMS and the database functionality that makes pages appear, there’s now a lot of complexity between the person who wants information to appear on a web page and the user who actually sees the information.
Figure 1-2 shows a web page promoting Go Gov!, a CMS developed for use by governments by the state of Oklahoma. You can visit the page at the following catchy URL: www.ok.gov/go.
So who are some of the people you might see added to a database-driven site team, in addition to the people you see on simpler sites, such as website designers, graphic artists, writers, and analysts?
A marketing site is a big step up from a brochureware site. The purpose of a properly designed marketing site, in our humble opinion, is to get leads. This is not “feel-good” marketing that makes visitors feel all warm and fuzzy, but doesn’t ask them to do anything specific. It’s a site that has goals and gathers hard evidence of success.
Many marketing sites build up a complete marketing lead from “bits and bobs” — pieces gathered from various sources. For instance, if you buy a list of leads, you can then compare that to people who have created a login for your website. The lead can now be extended to include information about the person’s on-site activity and marketing involvement with the company, such as participating in a webinar.
These leads can supplement, or be the main source of, the information that a company uses to run its sales operation. The list of leads is the interface between marketing, which generates and augments the list of leads, and sales, which uses them to contact potential customers and sell.
Many brochureware sites would do a lot more good for their companies if they were converted to lead-generating marketing sites. This latter kind of site actually makes the website part of a profit center, sales, rather than a cost center such as a brochureware site, with results that can’t easily be tied to sales revenue.
However, this is not an easy or necessarily an inexpensive transition. An example is the kind of software needed to manage this process. A company called Marketo automates much of the process of offering information, brochure downloads, webinars, and similar information online. Marketo software can track potential customers as they surf a company’s website, building up a complete lead a piece at a time, using a name and email address to generate a webinar signup, and then using the webinar signup to complete the lead with full customer information. (And then augmenting that with data about the lead’s participation in the webinar she signed up for.)
The difference between a brochureware site and an active marketing site is shown by something that happens only on the latter. If a potential Marketo software customer gives the company basic lead information and then checks the company’s software pricing page, he gets a call from a pre-sales employee within five minutes because Marketo has determined that this was the optimal window for moving the sales process forward. A subscription to the company’s software costs at least $500 a month, so it’s worth investing some time from an actual employee to contact a hot lead who was more or less ready to buy.
Like a brochureware site, a marketing site will need a designer, an artist, and a writer. More than a brochureware site, it will need multiple analysts to track information generated by the site. (And Marketo, among others, sells specialized software for this purpose.)
Active marketing sites are highly likely to be database-driven, so they will also need roles such as CMS manager, CSS expert, and database programmer, as described in the previous section.
Here are some other roles you might need for an active marketing site:
Figure 1-3 shows introductory notes to the PERL programming language from the U.S. National Institute of Standards. PERL is widely used in government for its facility with statistics, among other reasons. You can download the notes at www.ncnr.nist.gov/staff/nickm/perl/PerlIntroNotes.pdf.
Even simple sites can have an e-commerce capability, but this is usually an outsourced capability that’s driven by a shared web page or small amounts of HTML and/or CSS that allow an external e-commerce capability to appear to be part of other sites.
The e-commerce sites that most people are familiar with are database-driven sites that also have a marketing component built in. They can be exceedingly complex. The most well-known example of an e-commerce site is Amazon, which is so robust that it has spawned off a separate web software development platform, Amazon Web Services.
E-commerce sites support many functions at the same time. Their core capability, however, is the capability to complete a sale online.
As you can imagine, this puts a whole new kind of pressure on all the other capabilities included in an e-commerce website. Web pages showing products have to be easy to access, easy to use, and effective at gathering clicks from interested users to perform their part in online business. Similar considerations hold for the entire site.
In addition to the skills described in previous sections, and oftentimes a layer of management to supervise multiple contributors in a given role, job titles required for a robust e-commerce site are likely to include
Just about all colleges and universities, and a great majority of elementary schools and secondary schools, have their own websites. In some cases, the site is like a company’s brochureware site — it provides basic information about the school and who’s who in the school’s administration. However, more and more sites, especially college or university sites, are quite advanced. Here are the core functions that most college and university websites, and a growing number of sites for younger students, offer:
Like a company’s brochureware site, the non-interactive parts of a school’s website are developed largely to save money, while providing easier access, easier updating, and better ease of use. The interactive parts save money too.
What kinds of website developers are needed for an educational institution’s site? The roles are similar to the brochureware site described earlier — a designer for the site, a graphic designer, a writer, and an analyst for site traffic. For the many school sites that support academic services such as signing up for courses and turning in homework, there may also be people for database access and interaction design.