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This is more of an advice question than anything else. I am currently a Computer Science student. I was hoping to try to exphasize as much as I could in Web Development, but latey I have been wondering if I should continue this path. It seems to me like Web Development/Design is just so saturated, I'm not sure if it's something I should continue with. For example, you can go to RentACoder.com and put your project up to literally thousands of people to work on.

What is your opinion?
Where is the web heading and what would be a good way to prepare for the coming changes?
What areas are there right now that aren't so saturated?
What new stuff is on the way in the future that I could prepare for now?

Big questions, I know, but thanks for your input.

Hmmmm, web development is very active nowadays. It is very hard to see where it is heading, but my guess is that flash/javascript will become more and more common. Now this is a shot in the dark, but seeing that the overall image quality of sites grow larger, as well as their size leaves me to guess that the overall size which should be low on each site, will gradualy become larger and larger. Meaning more MB for one to fill up their webpage with. Resolution wise it is also going higher, so getting the web standard in terms of size is a nice place to start.

One of the 'new' things I think will become popular is 3d websites. Now, this does not mean slamming a 3d file into a webpage because it would be too huge for this day and age, but rather make movie sequences that guides you in a 3d type of way through the website. As long as the size is decent, it should work. At either rate, I think the structure/meaning of the website will be what ulimately is most important for the target audience. Design being something that is very important, but not all of the worlds largest sites have a design that would be considered as superb, but simple, structurated and effective instead. Now awesome design and user friendly pages can go hand in hand, but it is often better to keep it simple.

Seeing that more and more people tend to learn webdesign, I would guess learning either Dreamweaver+flash or GoLive+Flash would be a smart move. Again I think Flash player will become more and more common and its easy to download. I am guessing that new formats and stuff will be released, but so far I have done well with HTML, CSS and Flash, with a hint of photoshop and aftereffects.

Well, basicly my opinion. Web development is ceartainly active, but seeing where it is heading is rather hard at the moment.

I have a feeling that the web development area is saturated, too. And I get the impression that it's a less technical area and probably more design-y.

If you don't know what to do by the time you graduate, you could do an honours year! It seems to be a very popular option here.

Web design and web development are two very different things.

Web design is more for graphic designers, who design the basic structure and presentation for web pages. Web development consists of developing web applications and other programs that run on the web.

Where do I see the web going? For the last few years, there has been a huge emphasis on designing websites with standards. What does this mean? HTML was defined to be a document markup language which marked up the structure and semantics of a document. The presentation of the document was to be left to CSS, so that the content could still be accessible without the presentation. That way, devices that couldn't handle all of the graphical stuff that comes with CSS could do away with it and still get the gist of the site.

However, in the early days of the Internet, what we saw instead was kludgy design practices: incorrect usage of tags, use of nonstandard tags, designing for specific devices, and other things that made web content inaccessible to a large portion of the audience.

Coding webpages in accordance to web standards makes web programming much easier. I've always wondered why browsers put so much effort into rendering incorrect markup. It is much, much easier to parse correct markup than to guess at incorrect markup.

This brings me to web development. I see web development as development of applications for the web. What does that mean? Things like Gmail are examples of this. Especially now that many designers are designing with XHTML, we can do cool things with things like Javascript, like in AJAX. The advantage to this over things like Flash is that Flash is highly dependent on a proprietary format, over open formats like HTML, XML, and other basic web technologies.

In terms of the types of applications, I see things like Wikipedia, which encourage community participation and openness growing. I see things like Facebook or flickr connecting people through various ways. The great thing about the web is that it connects everyone together somehow.

Ultimately, I don't know if it'd be wise to focus on web development unless you had something specific you want to achieve. Outside of corporate caretaking of the website, most web apps are started by fairly new and small companies. It is fairly volatile compared to other fields, especially since not many people are still sure what to do with it.

I'm a Program Manager for DoD software R&D, deployment, and maintenance.

First, I don't think it is all that vital whether you decide on web development or some other pursuit. The folks we hire are either (a) good at general engineering across the board, or (b) specialists in a particular area. First and foremost, love what you do. You'll figure out quickly whether you're a specialist or generalist.

Second, remember that a lot of code work is going overseas. Expect this trend to continue. There are important exceptions to this: if you can get a security clearance, there are a lot of openings for coders and engineers working on Government projects.

For example, we use a particular tool, Informatica, that performs Extract-Transform-Load processes for transferring data between disparate systems. It is difficult for us to find Informatica programmers in the U.S. We end up paying top dollar for this skill.

Third, although "Service Oriented Architecture" is more of a buzzword than a legitimate concept nowadays, it is very true that systems are generally headed in this direction. This means tagging (XML), metadata, and net-centricity (buzzwords again, but you get the drift) are becoming important -- sharing of data between multiple systems on demand.

If I had to "do it all over again", the things I'd make sure I'd know were:

C++
Java (not JavaScript, although that is helpful)
XML
SQL
Database theory (normalization, dimensional modeling)
At least one database software (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2)
One front-end business intelligence visualization application (Business Objects, Cognos, ProClarity)
Unix/Linux
TCP/IP and networking

I know I didn't answer your question per se, but I hope I gave you something to think about...

I'm just about finish with my web design major. I'm staying and going to take all of the Photoshop classes, since I do feel that you will need them.

I think some areas in the country could be saturated in this field.

But here in Georgia, we are getting wave after wave of new people taking the web design major and just about 85% of us have a job opening line up for us.

I do want say that I go to a Technical college and our college goes out and looks for job opens for us, as we are in school. So, I don't know if that is a big help to us or not, but I would think so. Since we also have some very big technical companies come in and have a job fair also.

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