Where to develop a web designer?

Question

Design

Generally. The question is ... difficult, in my opinion.
To begin with, I read Tokovinin's article on Zuckerberg about the death of the website development market. Here she is. There are many opinions on this matter, but there is mine, and it was supported by this article from the Runet Rating.
Who am I? An ordinary web designer, from the pros, compared to fierce freelancing, I do it cleanly, I bring it to the end, I don’t disappear, in general, I behave like a more or less adequate designer. The portfolio is nice, I can always pull it up to the right level. BUT. There is one big but.
Together with our programmer, we put together a "web studio", attracted other freelancers to create traffic to our sites, everything seems to be fine. But I understand that sites are just candy wrappers, hypotheses are sucked from the finger, and the opinion of the customer is his personal opinion, and not the opinion of his target audience. We work with a price tag of 40-60 for a corporate site, with such a price tag it is impossible to deploy A / B testing, especially when there is no traffic yet.
Testing the conversion on your created sites is a very long-term money with an incomprehensible result in the output. In general, my head is already swollen, I don’t see the light at the end of the tunnel, given that my vision has begun to fall heavily from the computer.
I am more of an artist by nature, I like to create beauty. I love doing things with my hands. I would be happy to take care of home, family, health, hobbies. Or I would gladly become a specialist in a really cool and useful area for people.
What to do? Throw this next "web studio" nafig? Go to Upwork? Quit the web, move on to something else? Where to go next?

Answer 1

the essence of the problem is the need to work with customers, and strong competition and dumping
and there is another way - the dark side of programming: work on someone else
's ready-made standard fashionable template-framework endless
circulation in the samsara of the capitalist industry communication with morons
, psychopaths, swindlers, lazy people, etc.
office or freelance suffering necessary functionality independently constant googling of ready-made solutions depression and despondency
you need to design differently, program your life
, program it
, for example, you can make your own mobile applications on phonegap - the market is huge, a billion hamsters,
or invent your own information network that is interesting and useful to people, instead of Facebook and classmates and post-truth, there are
a lot of options

Answer 2

The website market is not dying anywhere, just as the video rental market has not died.
It's just that instead of renting videocassettes, there is now online viewing - as a more user-friendly service - that is, it has changed a lot.
The market for business card sites is moving to social networks - for a small business, creating a group on a social network and immediately getting a bunch of ready-made pluses is much cheaper, and most importantly, it’s really cheaper to get a search and registered users right away, by which you can even make selections - more profitable than fencing a stand-alone website.
If you make a portal, then this is no longer a website, but a business application with a web interface. At the same time, design skills can certainly come in handy there, but usability is more in demand. In addition, the necessary and working functionality such as a shopping cart, a connected and configured payment system, convenient import/export and editing of products and reviews are more important than beautiful scrolling and design.
Search engines do not pay attention to design, it is more important to meet their requirements. SEO is in high demand, but at the moment it is too incomprehensible profession. To promote someone - there are simply no adequate methods for an ordinary beginner. You must already have a network of resources in advance, with which you can promote another resource. Or buy clicks from search engines / social networks.
In other words, the trend is heading towards a serious change, because what web studios have been doing for the last 10 years is a lot of manual labor. In the field of IT, sooner or later this will have to be automated to the limit, and individual beautiful features will not be so important as to strain for them, well, with the exception of a certain small niche.

Answer 3

Engage in game development. Like me ;-)