Jeffrey Zeldman and the folks at ALA have just announced an interesting - and I feel - long-needed Web Design Survey. Don't be put off by the title if you're more of a developer than designer. It may as well be titled "Web Professional Survey". Quoting from the survey introduction sums things up well:

"Designers, developers, project managers. Writers and editors. Information architects and usability specialists. People who make websites have been at it for more than a dozen years, yet almost nothing is known, statistically, about our profession. Who are we? Where do we live? What are our titles, our skills, our educational backgrounds? Where and with whom do we work? What do we earn? What do we value?"

I've been earning a living as a fulltime employee doing nothing but web work for over 12 years now, and I still feel like the industry in general is viewed as immature, ill-defined, and often trivialized. Making content for the Web these days is easy (as it should be) Striving to do it well, in a scalable, usable, semantic, elegant and interesting way is difficult, and deserves encouragement and recognition. Surveys like this might help us (and others) see ourselves as a whole, or, as a part of a larger movement toward craftsmanship on the World Wide Web.

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