The Web Developer Career

I don't see the independent web developer's viewpoint expressed in the ASP.NET community. Most of the blog posts concern highly technical aspects of architecture, testing, advanced language features, etc. I would guess that the community is primarily made of up Microsoft employees involved in advancing the ASP.NET platform, technology writers specializing in ASP.NET, and consultants like MVPs. This makes http://weblogs.asp.net a good place to keep up with the state of the technology but every community can benefit from a variety of viewpoints.

I used to work for a very small company as a web developer and then I was let go and had to work for myself. Currently I am working full-time for a non-profit and should be concerning myself more with Windows Application development for the desktop. However, there is a surprisingly high demand for web developers and I've seen that you can easily remain employed as long as you keep up your web development skills. Going into business for yourself as a web developer is definitely practical due to the large number of Internet entrepreneurs out there. I didn't like being swamped with projects when I worked for that small company but I soon found myself swamped with work when I was working for myself because there is just too much work to be had. You don't even need to advertise or promote yourself. The cost of client acquisition is zero making it a sweet business to start. You get to work with a lot of entrepreneurs and act as an entrepreneur yourself making it somewhat exciting.

Nevertheless, there are some important considerations to take into account if you want to remain marketable as a web developer. First there is what technology and skills to invest in. I would argue that the platform is less important than the choice of business application. You can pick ASP.NET, LAMP, or Java but you should stick to one framework because it is too time consuming to master more than one. But after you've invested in a language and a framework you still need to make a wise decision in picking an application. Half of my work was customizing e-commerce shopping carts and half was taking up an abandoned custom web application. I think e-commerce shopping carts are a safe bet because you build expertise in a web application that is used by many companies.

Currently I am still doing a lot of work customizing LaGarde's Storefront shopping cart which was built for ASP.NET 1.1. So I still do most of my work in Visual Studio 2003.  I've built up a lot of expertise in that specific application which is a mess of VB classes in five projects. However, I now regret my investment in Storefront because LaGarde has abandoned their developer community and only services their enterprise clients. On the other hand this has left many small businesses in the lurch. They have also invested heavily in Storefront to run their online stores and now they must rely on a dwindling supply of developers to maintain it. I probably don't have a lot of competition anymore.

I should consider my options for a new web application to develop expertise in. There are many choices available to a web developer familiar with the ASP.NET platform. DotNetNuke seems to be a very popular web application framework with a good developer community. I know of a lot of independent ASP.NET developers involved in the DotNetNuke marketplace. I get the impression that there are many incomplete DotNetNuke deployments out there. It is easy to install DotNetNuke and appear to be making a lot of progress because you have the application infrastructure established. But then there is the difficult task of customizing the application to meet the business needs. This is where a lot of projects are abandoned leaving businesses with a need for a DotNetNuke developer.

Considering my knowledge of e-commerce I should favor another shopping cart application. There are many more shopping carts built with ASP.NET in competition with LaGarde's Storefront. I am somewhat familiar with BV Commerce which is very similar to Storefront. I see that BV Commerce 5 is now running on ASP.NET 2.0 but it costs $1500.00 for the developer version with source code. Maybe I could get the source code version by convincing a Storefront client to convert to BV Commerce?

Sharepoint is also a good web application option. I've even seen a few local jobs requiring Sharepoint expertise and Microsoft promotes it at local TechEvents. However, Sharepoint has a steep learning curve. I get the impression that you can make a lot of money as an expert Sharepoint consultant but I'm not so sure there is a demand for custom development. There does not seem to be a market for web parts. Maybe there is a lot of opportunity here because web parts are a cool technology which is being neglected.

There are other mysterious Microsoft enterprise technologies which I could specialize in but which seem to have no presence in the marketplace whatsoever. For example, Commerce Server has only a stub article on Wikipedia and I've never casually come across any articles on developing for Commerce Server. BizTalk is another server technology with a steep learning curve, a specialized market, and very little developer mind share.

I'm thinking about getting into more creative work doing web design and digital video editing but I don't think these careers offer as much steady work.

3 Comments

  • Indie developers are still far too overlooked, and I wonder what segment of the market we really occupy. Visual Studio and MSDN subscriptions are too expensive, as are conferences like Mix or Tech-Ed. You'd think the indie consultant types are exactly the people you want "selling" your product.

    ASP.NET bloggers tend to be very sciencey types too. I agree that there's a place for that, but I often want to stand up and ask, "What can you show me on the Internet that you did?" I suspect many wouldn't have much to show you.

  • We announced a price drop for BV Commerce 5 with source code last week. The full version is now only $499. I'd be happy to get you setup with a complimentary copy so you can evaluate the software for your clients. Give me a call at our main sales number and ask for Marcus.

  • at least in the Philly area, SharePoint is hot, and my company is moving towards expanding our SharePoint footprint. In addition, SharePoint developers (good ones) can make quite a bit more than your standard developer.
    I'm moving into SharePoint more myself and would def. recommend it. It's built on the ASP.NET 2.0 framework, so your learning how to do things the SharePoint way, but your still leveraging your ASP.NET 2.0 knowledge.

    Just my 2 cents.

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