BEYOND THE BUBBL;
With Glitz Gone, Web Designers Turn to Basics
By JENNIFER BELLANTONIO
Web design hasn’t gone away. But the sector has seen its share of casualties.
“There have been a lot of Web companies that have gone out of business because they couldn’t take the drastic shift from the dot-com era to the dot-bomb era,” said Phil Scott, chief technology officer at Juxt Interactive, a Newport Beach-based Web developer. “I think of it as a thinning of the herd.”
The plight of some Web consultants was symbolized earlier this year by the fall of the once mighty MarchFirst Inc., a Chicago-based company that had an Orange County office.
Since the dot-com bubble burst, Scott said, his business has gone from 26 people to 15. During the go-go days, Juxt went from eight employees to 26 in nine months. Back then, Scott said, he fielded four to five calls a week from unknown companies that wanted to tap Juxt for work.
“The fish were just jumping in the boat,” he said. “You didn’t have to cast a line.”
These days, Web consultants are back to mining the field for leads. Most work is coming from established brick-and-mortar players that still want,and need,an online presence.
“We haven’t had a lot of stand-alone dot-coms,” said Scott Shuford, vice president of Laguna Hills-based Big Man Creative, a small print and Web design firm. “Those are pretty much gone at this point.”
And the companies that are coming to Web designers for work no longer are interested in razzle-dazzle.
“They want to add functionality,” Shuford said. “They want (the site) to do something, whether that’s collecting information or providing layers of information.”
As a result, Big Man Creative, which cut one person this past year, has shifted to doing more programming work as opposed to pure graphic design.
The same is being said at other OC Web design players.
Most of the work at Juxt is focused on going into existing sites that are “botched or outdated” and redesigning them, according to Scott.
“I see a lot more of a focus on pure marketing and pure information technology on the Web,” he said. “A year or two ago there was a big push for extravagance on Web sites. Everyone wanted to spend money on games and thrills and bleeding-edge technologies.”
That tactic bled some companies to death, he added.
People are using the Web to conduct sales, manage inventory, exchange data with vendors and do other business operations,something Scott said “took a back seat” to the dot-com buzz but still is a “thriving undercurrent.”
“There’s less hype and more business based on bottom-line objections,” he said.
And Web consultants say they have to overcome skepticism and fight for scarce marketing dollars.
“People became more cautious in terms of actually taking the plunge and signing on the dotted line,” Scott said. “The sales cycle has become longer.”
Linda Ferguson, chief executive at Verbal Net/Page Masters, a Web consultant in Orange, also has watched budgets shrink.
“Businesses aren’t putting as many resources into overspending on the Internet,” she said.
And that’s despite the fact that prices for implementing Web technology,or making Web sites work,”have come way down,” Ferguson said.
“(Companies) are reeling from the uncertainty of business,” she said. “A lot of them are trying to shore up their own businesses to stay in business. They don’t want to put out a capital expense on something that doesn’t have a proven track record.”
Verbal Net/Page Masters has had fewer new clients but its existing clients are doing more on the Web, such as improving systems, redesigning Web sites and enhancing customer and vendor support, Ferguson said.
The changing landscape for Web designers has also meant other changes.
Both Big Man Creative and Juxt have partnered with advertising agencies that still want to offer their clients interactive services but have cut their in-house departments to lower costs.
Web designers say they are optimistic about new business, mainly because “the general public usage of the Web has gone up,” Ferguson said.
“The technology surge will continue to permeate the business community,” she said.
But, she said, companies will be smarter about it this time around. Last time was “too painful,” she said.
