The producers of the Web design and development conference Web Directions have released a free report of its first State of the Web survey of professional web designers and developers. The report includes details and analysis of all the responses to more than 50 questions covering technologies, techniques, philosophies, and practices that today’s web professionals employ.
You can read all the questions, download the complete (anonymized) set of responses, see tabular results to all the questions, the questions asked, or dive into our detailed analysis.
A Sneak Peek at Some Results
In short, what did the survey find? Some quite surprising results include
* just how few of the respondents use any form of Internet Explorer for their day to day web use (with only 3 out of over 1200 respondents using IE8), and similarly how few use Google Chrome as their primary browser, despite the splash the launch of that browser recently
* nearly half of respondents use Mac OS X as their primary operating system, and only 10% use windows Vista
* less than a third of respondents test their web sites with Internet Explorer 8 (while Mobile Safari comes in at 20%, and Chrome at 40%)
There’s also a great deal of interest in terms of the nitty gritty of web design philosophy and practice, from the high percentage of respondents who use JavaScript (around 95%), to the very small uptake of Silverlight (around 2% of all respondents) to the very high percentage of database driven sites (96%), overwhelmingly run on open source databases (over 80%).
When we first put together the survey, we really weren’t certain that the results would be of any great interest or value. But the number of responses (over 1200 from all over the world), and the results themselves definitely provide both food for thought, and in many cases, cause for optimism that web development best practices are becoming more widely adopted over time.
We’ve also made available all the results from the survey in CSV format. There’s all kinds of correlations that readers might be interested in investigating. For example, it might be interesting to compare use of HTML in government versus large corporations, or in the United States as opposed to Europe.
This article was last modified on December 14, 2022
This article was first published on February 13, 2009
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