No, web development will not die. However, the demand for web development skills will change as the internet evolves. As the internet becomes more global, web developers will need to be able to code in multiple languages, and they will need to be able to work on projects that are more complex and evolve faster than in the past.
Many companies will continue to use Drupal, WordPress and even custom-built CMS platforms. The demand for web developers will continue, but it will look different than it does today.
Web development will not die because the internet will never die. The internet was created to allow machines to communicate with each other. It allows us to communicate globally, it allows us to access information instantaneously, and it allows us to share our thoughts without censorship. These things aren’t going away. However, the way that we access the internet is changing, and the way that we communicate, and the way that we share our thoughts is changing in response.
Web development will also never die because the internet is becoming a more central part of every industry. From healthcare to advertising, from education to government, every business will be online, and every business will have a website or app that allows for communication with customers. This means that web developers will have a role in every industry, and every industry will need web developers.
What is the future of web development?
Internet and web design professionals are willing to see the bigger picture, that’s why they worry about how companies see their brand identity and other trends that are making web sites and user experiences as we know them become obsolete. Would they be able to adapt to this hostile new environment? Will web developers’ skill set become obsolete? Will they find a job in a web design agency?
Every web design agency will at least have an entry level content management or user experience supervisor, but have no way to know if this will be enough for every web developer in the world.
If we look a few years back we will see that the virtual world has changed a lot over the years. But web developers weren’t taken by surprise by that entry level change in user experience models and how brand identity is established. Web developers have grown and changed themselves with the internet. They were educated to know how to use the internet from a very early age, it is not something that was inflicted onto them, on the contrary, they willingly took the internet as a lifestyle and evolved with it. No one knows the internet better than a web developer. They may never notice there is a change going on because they are the change.
Don’t get us wrong, we are not telling you any internet change bypasses is something negative, quite contrary, it is always positive because the more the internet develops the more technologies and a specific skill set that allow a better user experience and better content management systems even in its entry level stage is needed. Web developers who try to challenge themselves and break the barriers of web development, the ones who are human beings and try to do business, the ones in constant adaptation of the latest web design trends even if it’s only by anecdotal evidence.
Web developers try to sell ideas via mobile apps on a web server. That’s why they pay a lot of attention to how companies dedicated to web design and web development are reacting to internet changes. Maybe frontend development is the most affected by this unsure future. A frontend development job title may not be as attractive as a job title that has to do with a web server. But also web server dedicated web developers are sure about the future, there is a lot of hope and coping in the industry now.
Internet web pages’ history
Without a doubt, to understand where web development is going we need to understand where it comes from. Some years ago human beings weren’t aware of what a website was, they weren’t even familiar with mobile apps or web apps, in order to create websites you needed to be way into software development, let alone web applications. There weren’t many programming languages that would help a web developer do the amazing things they do nowadays while they create websites, web applications and do software development. Before programming languages, only the most wealthy companies could afford to have web apps on their websites. This was before amazon Alexa and machine learning even existed, a time where web designers had to use software engineering and other archaic knowledge to try and rank in a search engine. Of course machine learning wasn’t available as well.
Nowadays, things have changed drastically. People and users are there and they are willing to interact with websites. Web designers know this and using software engineering are able to make people do whatever they want. Almost in a manipulative way. But website builders are becoming more and more popular. With that and artificial intelligence going around, any person, no matter how dumb they are, thinks they are capable of doing website design using these website builders without knowing anything about computer science. Of course, these lousy individuals charge way less than a true web developer who actually knows about software engineering, website design and computer science. This is one of the reasons why people may think web development is dying as a career, because they want to pay less for a lesser job that won’t get them anywhere a search engine rank or social media.
So…
Is web development really dying?
Web developers will not really say this, but they are not naive enough to think they are above the future. And the future is coming fast. Recently, more web developers have had to learn what big data or search engine optimization is. So the answer to the question “will web development die?” is frankly quite simple: no. Not now, not ever. Web development is here to stay? Will we still call it web development (the combination of user experience, search engine optimization, building websites) in 20 years from now? Who knows! But it would be the same at its core. Web development is not dying, it’s changing with humanity until both words mean the same thing.
Faster web pages
While building websites, the speed in which they operate is always something to take into account, as faster internet is available, the speed for websites will not end by using big data or a responsive design. That’s what web developers already designed amplified mobile pages that can be downloaded into an user screen in a matter of nanoseconds.
Diversified social media web development.
In the future, and we are already seeing it, social media will become more integral. We have already seen advertisements take over social media, which caused a radical change in how social media is developed. Social media like Facebook and Instagram want web developers to keep working in innovations that may benefit said social media. This is why web development can’t die: because billionaire industries depend on it, and this will be like this practically forever, maybe until human extinction. Maybe in the future web development will be a profession which is as respected as an astronaut. Who knows? It can happen.
But how to learn web development?
This was the second most asked question in our survey and it is quite easy to find an answer. Web development can be learned in many ways, from a school, to a book or an online course. Of course, some methods are better than others and there is a rather big difference between them.
Read: Where to Learn Web Development?
Web development schools: Schools were created for a reason: to give people a base for their future professions. This is what happens with schools that often teach the basics of web development, from HTML to CSS to JavaScript. Of course, these basics are not enough to build a website by yourself and that’s why they create online courses, but they don’t always take into account a lot of things. For example, in this article we have talked about things like responsive design, big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning. These things are not taught in schools, so you have to learn them yourself.
So will web development die? That’s something you will have to find out for yourself.
