The Web Designer Skill of the AI Era

Author

Jeff Sauer
October 31, 2026

Eight or nine out of ten people I know in digital marketing started out as web designers.

SEO people. Analytics people. Paid ads people. Branding. Social. Almost all of them built websites first.

And it makes sense. Back in the early-to-mid 2000s, having a website was like owning land.

The kind of land rush that happened in the US after the Louisiana Purchase, when the government gave people plots, and you just had to show up and stake your claim.

With websites, you didn't need to be a genius. You needed to be a little more technical than the person next to you and willing to plant a flag.

That's where we are with AI right now.

The people embracing it are grabbing whatever land they can. Building things. Making clients' lives easier. Figuring out what's possible. The specific skill almost doesn't matter yet. Being good with AI is the skill - the same way "can build a website" was the skill in 2003.

Then over time, something happens. You specialize. You figure out what you're actually good at, what connects to your existing experience, who your clients are. Plus what the market tells you is in demand. Then you become the AI person for that thing - not AI in general, but your version of it.

I've watched this play out in my own work. I went all in on AI in 2024. Two years of experimenting, trying things, building projects I wasn't sure would go anywhere. Now those experiments are the exact projects people are paying me for. I didn't plan that. It came to me through the doing.

So if you're anxious about which jobs exist in five years, I'd gently suggest you're looking at the wrong horizon.

Everybody needed a website. Then they needed traffic. Then they needed to know who was converting and why. Each wave created lucrative work for those already well positioned.

You don't need to predict the next wave. You just need to keep showing up.

Focus on learning the technology and developing expertise, and the rest will work itself out.

Until next Saturday,
Jeff Sauer

P.S. On Thursday, November 5 at 12 PM ET, I'm teaching a 2-hour live MeasureU workshop called AI Traffic Control - one of those specific plots of land worth claiming right now. If that sounds interesting, you can register here.

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