Agree with your gist completely. I’ve worked in the agency world, and there’s loads of “designers” out there who come primarily from a print background and only have a vague clue how the web medium actually functions. They often try to do something unique or interesting, but the result ends up just being weird or not at all best-practice. (“Lets put the menus on the bottom of the page. Eureka!”) Plus, the client ends up with a website that was designed to be printed out on 8.5x11 sheets of paper. I’m sure a lot of companies have gone through this experience and decided it was a massive ripoff compared to buying a $15 wordpress template and hiring a freelancer to update the content.<p>Of course, I’ve worked with many incredible web designers as well, and it’s definitely worth it for major brands to have a good design team. But that whole middle-lower-end market is probably just disappearing.