A lot of businesses have received intense stress tests during the pandemic. Web development, being a business, hasn’t been excluded from that as well. Organizations aren’t sure of the future – of marketplace, of revenue, of permanent changes that may exist in society – and many have chosen to hold tight with what they have on the web for the time being. We get it.
Still, web development as an industry probably hasn’t been as stressed as many other segments of the economy. After all, there are a lot of activities that are moving to online options from previously only offline options. Eyeballs haven’t reduced – for example, our traffic to our own site has doubled over last year, despite the fact that we’ve spent less on marketing it.
My gut feeling is that web development is going to be extremely stressed when we as society recognize that we’re about out of the pandemic – whenever that is. There will be pent up demand, and there will be new demand to deal with the unique economic realities and opportunities that are provided at that time. And then there will be the new economic realities, which at this point are still hard to read, but seem like it will be an ever-increasing push towards online.
The web labor force is likely to strain at that point. The web development industry still has time to prepare for it, but it seems like it might be an overwhelming time for many.