I may be wrong, but it seems like there are fewer and fewer static websites being made these days. Adding a certain amount of dynamics to my product, I'm hoping, will open up the market to me.
This is true, absolutely, but you don't need to be a developer to build dynamic sites, Drupal is quite flexible once you master it's CCK and Views and Joomla ain't to bad either.
So why bother trying, is that the question
No of course not, well maybe a small side of me feels that way, less competition equals easier life for me.
Certainly I appreciate being chellenged, it keeps me at the top of my game, the point, was that I would suggest you pick one and go with it. It's frustrating to see so many designer/developer hybrids out there, all listing their areas of expertise from Photoshop to Flash to PHP and jQuery and MySQL and Postgres. It's confusing to clients and not really justified.
Point is, the market is a little slim these days and I want to be able to expand what it is I can offer.
Thats the problem. If you wear to many hats you become a master of none and software will *really* suffer when it's built my half-fast developers. Just Google PHP applications and look at most of them. They look pretty but the bugs per line is outrageous and doing tech support for them is insane. I could list a few well known companies I have worked for in the past who developed garbageware -- but I will save political face.
If times are tight, it's even a better time to buckle down and focus on niche markets. It's clears your business strategy for starters, and makes you appear as a specialist for two, which more people will want to hire than a jack of all trades type.
I'm reluctant to go with Joomla or WordPress as it's usually pretty easy to tell one of their websites -- they have that 'manufactured' feel to them and I don't care for that
Drupal is the same way. WordPress is probably easiet to theme, Joomla being next and Drupal being a distant third. Although if you really adhere to Joomla template practices, they can get pretty complicated too. Personally I take a static page, strip the body, title and meta tags, and insert the required Joomla component and modules and away I go.
If a web site appears Joomla-ish (Drupalish or WP-ish) it's probalby because the developers/designers did not invest the time needed to really make it look professional, not so much the fault of Joomla and or Drupal.
If I thought that these WYSIWIG's were going to dominate the future design market, then I would adapt. I probably should just buckle down and learn to do things the hand-coded way, as that would be more my style. Will that be easy for me, probably not. But that shouldn't be the determining factor.
Joomla, Drupal and WordPress are not going anywhere anytime soon. You could probably safely ignore the others, IMO. Each comes with a learning curve, most frustrating for me, as an experienced developer was the lack of documentation in building modules, components, etc. It was a real trial and error experience, when all I wanted was to build some dynamic features for a web site.
Joomla was a little easier and WordPress felt like everything was hacked togather. If you do not have much experience in PHP you will not suffer the same fate as I have over and over again since Drupal, Joomla/Mambo/etc were released. You know what they say, ignorance is bliss.
But I'm still learning a lot and I'll get better over time. My clients don't want to outsource stuff because they've either had bad experiences or they simply don't trust anyone overseas enough to do it. They'd rather have an American who understands business, work flow and people do it.
DO agree that most programmers are lousy web designers. Left brain, right brain stuff. This is still a growth market though and there is plenty of business to be had for domestic programmers and not necessarily at slave wages.
It really had nothing to do with wages. Rather the proliferation of jack of all trades type people due to tough markets. You spread yourself to thin and the quality suffers. I hate crappy software as much as the next. If you or anyone, is going to become a developer, than go for it and dive in head first...don't however try and pass yourself off as a professional in business relations, software development, enterpsie security, network engineer, PR specialist, logo creator, brand specialist, baby bum diaper changer, etc.
Cheers,
Alex