X It will never stay the same

When you hand over a finished site to a client, you’re setting your design out into the big wide world and hoping it survives. Sometimes the content or perhaps goals of the site can evolve while your original design remains the same. This can be heartbreaking to see a site be ‘frankensteined’ as the site grows. Even with the most robust of CMSs, you rarely have control over every detail of how the site continues to look.

2. Transience

♥ Things are always changing

The Internet evolves alongside innovations in technology. With new developments in hardware and software come new and exciting ways to communicate your designs.

X Short shelf life

Even the most thoughtfully designed websites can’t last forever. Keeping the same general design for more than one or two years is pretty rare in commercial fields these days. Because the technology always rolls forward, sites become redundant fast. So don’t get too attached to that beautiful creation those cutting-edge jquery effects are going to look dated in no time!

3. Mastery

♥ There’s always something to learn

Keeps you on your toes and always adopting a student mentality. No time to be complacent the playing field is moving under you feet.

X There’s always something to learn

I don’t care what you say you can’t design great web sites if you don’t understand the web. You may have no skills in web development, but you need to know what’s out there and what’s possible. And with an ever-changing field, that’s hard work in itself. You can never rest on your laurels.

4. Delivery

♥ Broad reach

The web is such a flexible and pervasive medium. We can access and interact with it on our phones, PDAs, music devices, games consoles, applications and browsers. Designing for such a broad and diverse audience can be a lot of fun.

X Noise

Amidst the bustling traffic of the web, it’s hard to stand out. Moreover, be ready to relinquish some of your control over how your designs are delivered. Different screen sizes, resolutions, rendering engines, connection speeds and versions mean they will never look quite how you intended all of the time. Compromise is a necessary evil.

5. Community

♥ It’s a small WWW after all

If you’re lucky, you can work with people all over the world. It’s a medium that has no boundaries. It’s a huge, diverse, highly competitive yet extremely supportive community where you can always find a critique on your work, sometimes even when you didn’t even ask for one.

X Virtually alone

Whether you like it or not, web designers tend to give more ‘facetime’ to their computers than any single person. Be prepared for less direct human interaction. For many people, this can be a real upside, but if you’re a people person who needs to bounce ideas and talk things through, it can be hard creatively.