A colleague recently told me about his experiences putting together websites. Way back in 1996, a government department had no idea how much it should cost so they set aside a budget of $400,000(!!).

A few years later, a company decided that they needed to establish an online presence. They found a web designer, who told them that for a mere $40,000, their site could be built.

Fast forward to 2003 – the Internet had started to mature and become a viable revenue-generator for most ‚offline‘ product and service businesses. A wide range of web design companies and specialist firms had sprung up in addition to clearing houses such as Elance and Guru.com.

What these companies were paying for was expertise; they didn’t understand the technology. In a way it’s like when cars were a new technology and those who could afford to have one would often keep a mechanic on retainer as well to deal with this new and (then) arcane technology.

We have been seeing an increasing trend towards a democratisation of web technology over the last few years, however – and midrange web design firms are being forced into a lower price range (or out of business altogether). It is becoming simpler to design and manage websites with every passing year.

The higher end of highly skilled web designers (the ones who companies will pay for) are starting to shift towards analytical and marketing services rather than technical ones.

New technology is democratising the web in these areas:

Web Design:

There are now a lot of choices for software which anyone can use to build a relatively good looking website in an hour or less. There are also a lot of user-friendly content management systems which let users design a website without ever seeing any code. While these programs usually don’t have a lot of advanced features, they work fine for any simpler sort of website.

Analytics:

Only a few years ago, you needed a specialist in order to pull any useful statistics from your site other than page views. However, there are now a wide variety of cheap or free tools which can give you all of the data you could possibly want.

Conversion Optimisation:

Landing page content analysis has also progressed greatly. Testing alternate landing pages is the heart of conversion optimisation; it used to take specialised software to track visitor behaviour.

As someone who provides these kinds of services, I think that a lot of companies feel like what they are paying for is the technical aspects (method) more so than for the marketing aspect (results).

Testing functionality is in the process of becoming freely available via new services. (While they don’t provide particularly advanced functionality, they’re adequate for most uses and are certainly easy to use).

Providers of conversion optimisation services are thus going to have to ensure they add sufficient value in terms of marketing smarts as the technical side becomes more accessible and transparent.

Especially for those on the lower end, analytical and marketing skills are eclipsing technical ones as the services which are the most marketable to their clientele.

Now, there is always going to be work for people with specialised technical skills; but an increasing number of the simpler technical duties will be outsourced to the developing world.

In the next several years, where there will be the most growth is in marketing skills to assist companies in increasing their return on investment. Optimising web marketing methods can bring far more value to a business than can investing in new technology.

About the author: Mr David B. Ascot shares sales lead generation strategies that get results so your company can boom through online lead generation.