How many web designers are there?

Not very many, but there are huge number of pretenders.

Nice answer!.... but I can’t put it on my business plan :-)
or could I?

Just put a huge disclaimer on the cover of the box. “If you are just a pretender web designer, move on; for this software will break you.” That should clear up any confusion.

The U. S. Department of Labor maintains statistics on people who work in various occupations. You could see if any information is available from them.

Box? what box? This is 2009!

I wonder if anyone knows the REAL answer or has a suggestion where I could find out these types of statistics?

Well was going to make a REAL suggestion, but never mind.

Oh I guess I also forgot I live in 2009. Let me get the f@#$ out of your way so you can make your fortune.

Thanks cwilbur a great idea and thanks for the suggestion. I’ve scanned their site and it looks like they don’t break down to web designers, just generic computer sectors. I appreciate the help though.

So far, the best I could do was find out how many there are working in British Columbia

http://skilledimmigrants.vpl.ca/index.php/guides/industry/web_designers_developers

It’s a start eh?

I don’t know if you could get a definitive answer. Every website on the internet was “designed” by someone. As @DarkScribe points out, it’s hard to separate good, professional designers from the rest who have designed websites.

Are you looking to market to front-end designers (HTML, PHP, Dreamweaver, Photoshop folks) or back-end developers (serious coders and database people)?

yes, I know some people do both

Thanks lillycoyote, a start indeed and thank you pheonyx. Yes I agree that many sites are not built by professionals. One of the reasons for considering building the software is to make it easier for people to build compliant, modern websites and therefore making the web a better place. Still I have to fund it somehow so a very rough idea of “people who continue to build websites” would be useful.

Hi cprevite, the plan is to help non-coders – the web designers who don’t want to retrain to code but still want to provide sites that are more “Web 2.0”

Perhaps the world wide web consortium has some useful information? Also, the US Department of Labor has some useful stats. Accordingly, they show that “computer scientists and database administrators held about 542,000 jobs in May 2006”.

It may be a very difficult statistic to pin down. The Bureau of Labor Statistics http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos042.htm doesn’t break the numbers down specifically for web designers, I imagine they fall under their “Computer specialists, other” category but that would probably include people who aren’t web designers. And as other people have pointed out, there are a lot of freelancers of varying degrees of skill and professionalism.

Er, if people aren’t comfortable with HTML and CSS code, they’re not web designers, they’re generic graphic designers who need to brush up on their skills if they intend to make a career in the web.

And people who aren’t comfortable with code are going to be on the trailing edge of web design no matter what.

By non-coders I meant people not comfortable with JavaScript, AJAX, PHP, Perl, Databases, SQL, etc.

Thank you very much all, Its my first time on Fluther and I am overwhelmed by the response!

I think you are right though – the stats are problably not out there.

It depends a lot on what portion of that group you’re aiming to target. There are probably more web developers in the world than there are web designers. Web applications are often crafted by teams of people with degrees in computer science, and involves database programming and clean design patterns (MVC seems to be the latest buzzword), and these people are often going to be categorized under Computer Science, since it is “full-blown” application development.

As for designers… there are enough good ones and enough bad software in the world that if you made a compelling product, you could make a splash. Many good designers are using Mac OS X, if not a vast majority. They’re drawn to attractive programs with pretty interfaces that also don’t skimp on functoinality.

“Many good designers are using Mac OS X” – Do you mean web designers, if so I am surprised by that and it is very interesting to know. Is this from personal experience or a know fact? It could have quite a bearing.

Do you really think there are more web developers than web designers?

I love the way technology goes round in circles, Model/View/Controller has been around as long as me – and that’s a long time ;-) or do you mean something else?

Well, yes MVC has been around in software development circles for decades, but the recent pile of web application frameworks that focus on the idea, starting with Ruby on Rails, MVC has become a buzzword in web development circles. Microsoft even released a framework for ASP.NET that is literally called ASP.NET MVC, even though many could argue it isn’t even true MVC—buzzword!

I know from experience and I think it’s a pretty well received fact that graphic designers of any sort use Mac. Virtually all of the designers I follow use Mac.

ahh OK “graphic designers” that makes more sense. Web Designers have less tools on Mac.

I don’t know helpful this is would be, but you could always try contacting AIGA (http://www.aiga.org) or Aquent (http://www.aquent.com), as both do annual surveys about designers. The Design Council in the UK take a similar role.

And, FYI, I’m a graphic and web designer, and I use a mac (as do most designers I know). I only touch a PC to test sites.

Just saw your response – a good web designer doesn’t need many tools: pen, paper, something like Omnigraffle to wireframe, a text editor to write code, Photoshop to wrangle images and either a SVN or FTP client. Maybe Flash (ugh). All of which are more than available on a mac.

@ninthart In my opinion many of the tools for wireframing, text editing, and SVn/FTP are significantly better on Mac than anything I’ve used on PC. Examples are TextMate, Transmit, Coda, Cornerstone (Versions is good too), etc. So my point is, @froamer, Macs generally have better, more worthwhile tools than PC for design, and equally powerful tools for development.

Thanks ninthart I’ll look into that, it could be a great help. I think the software should therefore be platform independent, or run on the web so we do not exclude anyone.

Web applications seem to be the way to go :)

Yep – I agree. Thanks for all your input, much appreciated!

@noyesa – Oh, I quite agree. Personally I use Textmate, Coda, Espresso and CSSEdit at different times. All of which are Mac only.

@froamer – Yup, a web app is a very nice compromise!

@froamer: if you build a web app or something platform-independent, you’re likely to completely exclude your entire Mac-using potential customer base. People who choose Macs often do so because of the high quality and consistency of the user experience, and if you abandon that for a cross-platform product or for a one-off web interface, you’re starting out with two strikes against you.

Well, probably a good way to find out is to say that there is at least 1 web degisner for each website. That many.

@cwilbur do Mac users really not use web apps? Surely it would depend on how good the web app is, the quality of it’s user experience, if it saved them time and money and improved the results. As a PC user I use whatever tools that help.

@sscoolio I don’t think we can assume there is one web designer per website, many will be built by one person, or by hobiests, or business owners. It would be great if we could though.

@froamer It’s not that Mac users don’t use web apps, but that Mac enthusiasts enjoy the quality and thoughtful interfaces you’ll find in a well designed Mac app. I prefer having good tools running on my desktop than in my browser. What people are doing with the web is amazing, but if there’s nothing rooting your app to the browser, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to deploy it that way. With invoicing and contact managers and collaboration tools, the very social nature of these apps benefits from being anchored in your browser, so they make compelling web applications. Invoicing apps, for example, can benefit from one-click printing and mailing. It can be done on the client, but is just simpler in a web app. However, tools to aid designers might be better off running on the client.

@froamer: Mac users do not use web apps with shoddy user interfaces. The bar for what annoys a Mac user is much higher than for what annoys a Windows user; because of the polish on the Mac experience, and the fact that native Mac applications tend to be extremely consistent in their look and feel, things that are not consistent are almost painfully so.

This is not the case on Windows or Linux, where there are some excellent apps but the overall experience is much less consistent.

It does depend on the quality of the user experience, though. But you’re entering a marketplace where there are already several good native offerings, and so a web app has to be that much better.

Thanks for the “Mac” feedback. I’ll bear this in mind. Generally I think the line between good quality web apps and desktop apps is blurring, perhaps more so for non-Mac users.