Most Web Deveoplers are Posers.

These are issues affecting the industry as a whole, there is no way of regulating the website designers out there. I know of a guy who sells his services as a web developer, but he "develops" using Site Spinner Pro...seriously. For this reason, any school child can ask his mum to buy him the software and be a web developer. This is sickening, this guy has never heard of the term "MVC architecture", he doesnt even begin to understand what MySQL database driven application is. With the release of Artisteer, any idiot can create a Joomla website and have it up and running in 1 hour for R100. it is no wonder that the www is over crowded with useless websites developed by useless "developers".

My Experience is as follows:

A client that truly wants a unique website with unique features will do research about the industry, and soon realise that 80% of the "Developers" will not be able to help them. becuase they only develop static HTML sites or Joomla Site Templates. If they want a non-joomla cms, they are going to come to you.

It is the truth my friend...

There is a lot of "posers" out there making all your money.

Yep...cant say I disagree with that...

The industry is self regulating. You get what you pay for.

Agree....and they seem to reside mainly on Gumtree!

It's a confusion of terminology and most people are too thick to understand the difference. What you're describing is a web designer - guys who play around with formatting etc. It's the same issue with engineers - anybody who does anything even remotely technical suddenly takes on an engineer suffix, probably because they see some sort of stigma attached to the term "technician". Oh and let's not even get into "analysts"

Thanks for the tip on Artisteer

Actually I'm a "real life" developer, but Artisteer looks like a nice place to build your skeleton theme and then to move on from there. Should take a whack of time off using notepad initially.

Mike Hoxbig said:

It's a confusion of terminology and most people are too thick to understand the difference. What you're describing is a web designer

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The bigger problem is that "people", is this context, refers not only to clients, but "developers" as well. Reading "PHP for Dummies" does not a developer make.

On the other hand, you can't judge someone's ability based on qualifications either; we all know that there are plenty of very good devs without a degree or any formal training. Likewise I believe that the majority of people graduating with computer science degrees are not well equipped to be "real" developers.

So, yes, there is a definite problem in our industry with regards to determining someone's skill without actually seeing any of their work. Maybe someone should give out "real dev" badges to "deserving" people, but therein lies a related problem: given the diversity in the wide field of software development, it is extremely difficult to define "deserving".

jan12345 said:

It is the truth my friend...

There is a lot of "posers" out there making all your money.

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Maybe, but it bothers me not. The huge demand for web developers, both front and back-end, leave us in a comfortable spot.
Let the WYSIWYG 'ers and one man shows take the small once off start up jobs. For the most part, people who pay proper money for web apps ,custom designed and hand crafted sites know the difference.

jan12345 said:

... any school child can ask his mum to buy him the software and be a web developer...

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If a company wants a 5 page website with a gallery of images, a contact form, and a few links to their social media pages, then yes....a school child nowadays could do it. Good for them. On the other hand, trying to find a skilled php programmer, is not that easy, and those industry professionals can probably name their price? If you want to make money you have to specialise (great graphic design, or social network integration etc). If you are a specialist, and there is a demand for that level of website....then you should make a good income. I'm wondering what happened to all of those flash designers from a few years ago...are they still around...or are they all html5 programmers now due to the growth of mobile platforms?

eta - I have a 12yr old who scours javascript websites, and already finds basic html a breeze. It takes far longer to teach them how to create good graphic design, than to understand what placing code in the right place does. He uses Notepad....and was doing great, until he walked in one day and said...check out WIX.com ...I do need to get him back to Notepad soon.

There are still afew around, we have 3 flash guys in our agency, still a big demand for flash websites, sadly.
But ye, maybe some of them become designers or front end developers with actionscript forking off ECMAScript

I also agree, a friend of mine has a web development business and he barely knows HTML, maybe he gets away with designing logos and finding templates to tweak. In his defence, he has learnt a bit about theming Joomla so at least his stuff works.