Yeah. I have noticed recently that the previous model of how things are done in the web design world has shifted slightly. What’s more important, it appears to be still moving in that direction, thus making an impact that will probably be visible in a couple of months. The current division on a bell curve would look somewhat like this:
The problem
With web design agencies managing customers that are either high prestige or high on budgets. Then smaller, 3 people teams (designer, programmer, project manager usually) manage smaller businesses, with less prestige and less hype around them. But they do manage to get a bigger deal from time to time (high end of the division). Then there are freelancers who do mostly small, cheap sites and designs and manage to do them a lot thus making a living that way. But some things had changed in the past few months and there’s a momentum here that I will show you on the next graph. I have noticed that in the last 3 months 50% of my friends who worked at a web agency quit their jobs and started a “3 people team”. But taking in account their knowledge, and what’s most important the customers knowledge OF them they manage to squeeze out some more money thus taking it from the piece that was originally reserved for an agency. That in turn makes those 3 people teams want less to do with smaller projects, leaving much more room for freelancers. So what’s a web design agency to do? Either transform into something else or shrink even more of its share hoping that there will be simply more high profile clients with higher budgets coming. That of course is quite possible.
The shift
The shift would probably look like the one below. Not a great big one yet, but noticeable and “getting there” slowly.
The reasons for that are many. Ones that can come to my mind currently are the prices which are a bit (but not really dramatically) lower when done by a 3 people team than by a 50 people web agency. The second thing, and that’s most important – agencies don’t motivate people to do good. They motivate people to do “good enough”, get paid and sign the invoices. Thus people in agencies are generally more frustrated than the other two groups, resulting in less “heart” put into the work. And slowly the clients start to notice. The effectiveness of a team where each person gets less than 1% of the money for the project is drastically lower than that of a team where everyone gets at least 20% of the money. That is a fact.
The future
So will we see a future change in the diagram? Or will it stop eventually making the “3 people team” the largest group in terms of projects in the whole web design world? We’ll probably have to wait and see, but I think this is quite a possibility.