What do web designers make a year?

not enough as my brother would put it.

it wouldnt be a main job, but a side job, unless its for a major corp.

Difficult question to answer, need a little more detail, are you looking at:

a) Looking at working for a bigger firm and working for them?
b) Looking to work as an independent freelancer and stay outta an office environment?
c) Looking to start a web design firm and grow?

Anywhere from nothing to $200K.

Where are you talking about? A web designer in New York City will make more than a web designer in small-town Wyoming.

What skills does the person have? A web designer who can barely remember what icon to click on to start Dreamweaver will make a lot less than a web designer who can code in HTML and CSS, break down his pages into chunks for template engines, and understands cross-browser compatibility issues and workarounds.

How much experience does the person have? Someone starting out will make less than someone who was writing HTML for NCSA Mosaic 1.0.

What kind of company is the designer working for? The head designer for the New York Times web site makes a lot more than the head designer for a nonprofit organization, and both probably make more than a self-employed freelancer.

As stated, varies by location and skill level.

I have a full-time gig as a developer and have more freelance work than I can do.

This chart seems fairly accurate; for a developer not designer.

http://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Web_Developer/Salary

Oh, that’s the other thing—for every one web designer who knows his stuff cold, there are 15 to 20 who are blithering incompetent idiots. And they throw off the average considerably.

@glial: that chart may be accurate for where you live, but competent web developers in urban areas make considerably more than that chart would indicate.

True.

I live in an area of roughly 300,000; I consider that pretty small. But in the same sense, the cost of living is much much lower than urban areas.

What area of the country to you live in?

Metropolitan Boston.

Ya, just ran a cost of living comparison. I would need to make $36,000 more to live in Boston lol.

Cool, are you going to Web Design World this year?

Hard to say at this point—I’ve been doing a lot more AJAXy stuff, and I’m doing back end server development and leaving the pretty stuff to the marketing and web content departments. On the other hand, it’s right here.

Went to Seattle last year; too late for Chicago. But I may end up going to Boston.

The conference was a pretty good time last year, other than the Ajax Bootcamp. It was pretty weak.

I’ve actually been to An Event Apart twice; that was a fascinating and interesting experience, except for the fact that I got back to the company I was then working for and it was all the same non-standards-compliant BS and business as usual. We’ll see what there’s support for in the budget come December, and if there’s anything else I’d rather go to more.