The State of the Web 2008 - a Survey of Web Designers and Developers

At Web Directions and Westciv, we’ve been strongly focussed on the standards based web, and best practices in web design and development for well over ten years. Over that period, we’ve seen the rise of CSS, along with the decline of presentational HTML. We’ve seen knowledge of issues around accessibility grow from next to nothing to being seen as fundamental to best practice. We’ve seen the use of semantics HTML become common place.

But, objective research like Opera Software’s MAMA, our own 2005 survey into the top 100 Australian web sites, SitePoint’s 2006 “State of Web Development” survey, and other similar projects indicate we’ve still got a long way to go.

So, we are introducing The State of the Web, a survey of practicing web designers and developers, which aims to capture how people are developing for the web right now. It focusses on several areas including

• browsers and operating systems developers use and test for
• Design and development practices and technologies, including HTML, CSS, JavaScript and back end languages

The survey runs until December 20th, and we’ll publish both a detailed summary, as well as the raw data early in 2009. If it turns out to be valuable, we plan on making this an annual survey.

The survey should take only about 20 minutes or so to complete. It’s anonymous, but we do ask you register, both to help us maintain the integrity of the result, and just as importantly, to enable us to give away cool stuff to those who participate, including passes to future Web Directions events of your choice, including Web Directions North in Denver. Of course, we’ll only use any email addresses for the purposes of communicating about the survey, and won’t share them with anyone.

Thanks in advance for taking the survey, and here’s to finding out the State of the Web in 2008.

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