Do people still need web designers?

By Charlie B, Deliberate Design.

The short answer: fewer people need a designer to make a page exist. Builders and AI do that. What people still need is someone to decide what goes on it, make it look like it belongs to a real business, put it live properly and be there when it breaks. That is a smaller job than it was, and it should cost less than it did. Mostly it still does not, which is the gap we work in.

What changed

• Making a page is easy. Wix, Squarespace, and now AI will produce one in minutes
• The basics are automatic: phones, the padlock, sitemaps
• Words come faster. AI drafts, a person checks

What did not

• Knowing what to leave off. Most self built sites say too much
• Photos. Nothing replaces a decent photo of your actual work
• The last ten percent: the domain, the email, the Google listing, the form that actually arrives
• Someone to ring

What you are paying for in 2026

Judgement and responsibility, not hours at a keyboard. The honest price for that on a small site is a small one off fee and a modest monthly, which is what we charge. The old £3,000 for five pages was paying for hours that no longer need to be spent.