Who, what, and how: a survey of informal and professional Web developers

Abstract

We describe a survey of Web developers in which we collected over 300 responses from individuals with widely varying levels of experience and training. This survey continues our studies of informal Web developers, loosely defined as those who develop Web sites but have not been trained as programmers. They are a growing segment of end user programmers, but very little is known about them, and this survey was aimed at helping to characterize this population. In this paper we report on survey questions probing Web development projects, tool use, development process, reuse, and learning and collaboration. Throughout the discussion we compare the responses of developers who self-identify as programmers with those who do not. We use these comparisons as a basis for discussion of tools that might assist nonprogrammers in Web development.