Sarah Parmenter

We’re being asked to do more and more as a profession and something’s got to give. Fortunately, this well-known designer has made it her mission to help front-end devs secure fair remuneration for their efforts, as her upcoming talk at Generate London is set to reveal

- Tom May

There’s no hiding it: we’re genuinely excited about the talk Sarah Parmenter will be giving at our Generate London conference on 19 - 21 September. Because she’ll be addressing a subject that’s increasingly important in our industry, yet not often talked about.

“[I’m looking] at how everything we’re learning about social media at the moment needs to be wrapped into web design,” she explains. “I believe this is as important as learning about responsive web design was back in 2012 or 2013. Nowadays, we have to understand marketing strategies and there are loads of other elements to our jobs that are growing beyond just dealing with code.”

Of course, some companies think social media means they no longer need a website at all but Parmenter dismisses these as outliers. “The majority of firms still recognise the need to have a website, a base of their own online,” she says. “However, the seachange we’re experiencing is more about the decreasing effort that people are putting into that base.”

Clients, in short, are moving their priorities away from website maintenance and more towards Facebook advertising. “But what they don’t realise is that the whole thing needs to work together,” she points out. “It’s not enough to just have great Facebook advertising, for example, if the call to action on your website doesn’t instil confidence in someone to buy your product. So the whole thing feels like a house of cards at the moment. If it’s not all lined up properly, the whole lot falls down.”