Lea VerouThere are many surveys out there diving deep into specific aspects of the web making ecosystem; surveys around specific languages, specific frameworks, surveys from companies of specific tooling targeting their users, and so on.
And yet when we set out to answer the question in the title, we found that despite the cornucopia of data, the big picture was unclear: what is the bird’s eye view? What does the overall architecture of web making in 2024 look like? How do folks collaborate? What stops them from getting their content out there, and what makes it easier? What’s the whole elephant?
Image credits: Sketchplanations, CC-BY-NC
A variety of factors were making the big picture difficult to discern. Most surveys we examined exclusively targeted developers, but web-making takes many different skills: web designers, content editors, ops folks, product people, and many others. These folks needed a voice too.
Other surveys told us more about a specific audience than about web making as a whole. Take JS frameworks as an example. The answer to the age-old question ”How much are JS frameworks actually used?” varies dramatically depending on which dataset you ask. State of JS tells us a whopping 84% of JS developers use React; yet the Web Almanac paints a different picture, with only 8% of websites scraped using it. The answer is probably in the middle, but that’s a huge spread!
Naturally, we set out to find our own answers! The inaugural Survey Awesome 2024 was born as a result.
We tried hard to develop this survey in a way that is inclusive to the vastly different methodologies people use to develop websites, from complex full-stack codebases to drag & drop visual builders, and to the varying roles and skill sets involved in web publishing. The jury is still out on whether we succeeded; this is the first time we are widely deploying a survey, so there will certainly be kinks to be ironed out! But if all goes well, we do intend to make it a regular thing.
The survey will be open for three weeks, closing on December 20th. Once we analyze the results, we will share them with the community.
Making of: The survey is made with Tally + a fair bit of custom code. We plan to publish a follow-up blog post about how we hacked around Tally to be able to insert (and style!) the 123 (!) Font Awesome icons used in it. Stay tuned!
