As part of my ongoing attempts to see into the future, I have decided to think about the answer to a fairly common question asked in some form or fashion on web design and SEO discussion boards: “Where are the jobs going to be in the future?”

I’ve prepared a simple pie chart (thanks to my intermediate Excel skills) that illustrates where the web design/SEO employment positions will end up at some point within the next five years:

As this chart indicates, the number one source of future web design employment will be in-house; as organizations come to the collective realization that a website is no longer a luxury but a necessity for future business growth, they will in turn hire designers/developers to manage their websites. This section of the chart also encompasses self-employed webmasters whose websites are their sole source of revenue/income (e.g. webmasters who build websites with ad revenue streams).

The #2 source of web design jobs/work in the future will go to those web designers/developers who assume an added role for their clients (e.g. IT servicing, order fulfillment, marketing).

Local specialty web design companies/individuals will take on the #3 role; these are the conventional web design companies/designers/developers we know today.

The rest of the web design/development and SEO positions round out the pie chart.

So Why Does SEO Make Up Such a Small Piece of the Pie? Are You Some Kind of Idiot or Something?

Probably, but I’m an idiot with a point and I will make it in due course. Read the rest of this post and you’ll see exactly what the point is and why dedicated SEO itself will take on an increasingly smaller share of the employment pie.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to this post on Matt Cutts’ blog, I was The Davos Question, which asks “What one thing do you think that countries, companies or individuals must do to make the world a better place in 2008?”

My initial response to the question was to reintroduce the California zero-emission mandate of 1990 to the world and get as many places as possible to comply. For those unfamiliar with the mandate, it required that automobile manufacturers who wished to do business in California were subject to a law regarding the production of vehicles; at least 10% of those vehicles were required to be zero-emission vehicles (or ZEVs). For those of you who read my ZENN Cars post, it was an extension of this logic.

(Side note: ZENN Cars have very quietly been cleared for sale in Canada…I just found out about this two days ago.)

However, I thought about The Davos Question a bit deeper since then, and I’ve come to a different realization: we have a much deeper and more urgent issue to deal with, and if we don’t we might do significant damage to ourselves and each other…for no good reason whatsoever. We need to deal with what I call “death devices”.

What is a death device? A device, such as a gun or a bomb, whose sole purpose is to do harm to or kill another creature.

Here’s why we need to stop them:

Death Devices Can Only Do Harm

Why do we have devices on the planet that serve no practical purpose? Even knives can be used to cut boxes open and carve food so that we can eat it.

Death Devices are the Tools of Cowardice

If you want to settle a dispute with another human being, settle it with the things Mother Nature provided you. Say what you want about UFC or MMA; at least those guys do it with their (more or less) bare hands. They don’t need to hide behind weapons.

What Are We Defending Ourselves Against?

One of the common excuses for owning a death device is defense: “I need to protect myself”. Against what? In most cases, other human beings…who quite often use the same type of tools to attack in the name of “defense”.

“We Need to Defend Our Country’s Freedoms”

This is an extension of the above logic: many countries send soldiers to foreign lands to “defend the country”. If you have to send your army to a foreign land in order to defend it, no one’s attacking you.

Wars and Battles are Started for Silly, Weak Reasons

The two most common causes of war are:

1. Religious beliefs, which are just that: beliefs They’re not facts. They’re not proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. They are beliefs.
2. Resources. I remember watching a video in a history class as a child that outlined the root causes of war between Lower and Upper Canada (now known as Quebec and Ontario) in the late 1700s. The narrator picked up a paper grocery bag and took items out of it that represented the various items that Quebec and Ontario were fighting for. I don’t remember the items themselves other than that they were relatively common things such as bread and milk, but I do remember the total of those items: $5.50.

   Obviously, the number of items in total would not fit into a single grocery bag, and this was clearly done for dramatic effect, but the message was and still is pretty clear: they were fighting over groceries. Find some other ways to get your groceries…blowing someone up over them just isn’t worth it.

Death Devices Create Propaganda Spinoffs

Government leaders with low country approval will often “create a war” based on a false pretense in order to be able to gain support from a populace that doesn’t receive all of the facts. Media outlets are often used to effectively promote the cause, and off we go.

Long-Term Psychological Damage

People never consider the damage they do to other families and to themselves. The long-term psychological damage from the Vietnam War has been long documented, with over 100,000 soldiers committing suicide as a result of the emotional trauma that they suffered.

Reduction of Resource That Could Be Used for More Positive Things

By eliminating production of death devices, an indirect environmental benefit is created whereby we reduce the consumption of resources required to create said devices. We also free up R&D resources that can be used to develop other products and services that have a more positive effect for humankind.

We need to send death devices to their own version of Valhalla…now.