I'm not a web designer, but it seems to be a miracle birth in the naija job scene. I mean no lousy degree's to screen you out, just provable skills. And the pay-ha! dream bucks!!

This brings up the queston: is IT in naija-which seems to tilt blatantly to web development approaching a bubble stage? Is supply going to surpass demand and eventually drive down prices by giving the customer choosing power?

Besides we all know all other sectors are slumbering-jobs no just dey! Can one build on it as a career?

See also 'Is The Web Design Business Lucrative?'

It's not a bubble. There's a genuine demand for web presence in the country, and there are companies abroad that will like to outsource to Nigeria if the fraud factor is reduced.

As the money you can make for building a simple website goes down, there will be more demand for advanced dynamic websites. So a web developer who is improving his skills every day will continue to make money.

I agree with Seun on this, the need for web presence is increasing by the day and once the impact is felt, companies start looking for websites that do automagical things not just static or flash animations.

It gets to a stage where a business entity will want to simply web enable almost every part of the business process and that's where the programmer comes in and again that's why the real money is.

If you can get up to speed with PHP and say MySql, then you have all it takes to do almost anything on the web.

Bubble or not, all that goes up must come down. Just a reality. Demand now is high, but as time goes on, every okoro, tunde and suleiman will have a website and demand will go down. At that point, as seun stated above, demand will turn from those who "slap together" websites, to those who "know" websites.

Also, in my opinion, as I have experienced in the states, after a dynamic site has been put together, in order to keep the clients coming, demand will also turn towards those who know how to create the best front end experience, a.k.a. the User Interface. It won't be about the senseless iterative flash nightmares people put up. No, it will be about making sites lightweight, making them "richer".

Finally, what to me will set the naija web dev biz ablaze is when naijans in naija will be able to accept/make payments via credit card or paypal and not just bank deposits. In my opinion, someone in naija should come up with such a set up, rather than wait and consequently be humiliated, by oyibo and their blacklisting policies. If we no do am, na who go do am?

Having said what I have just said, again in my opinion, now is the time to jump aboard the naija web dev/software dev ship. As Nnamdi Azikiwe stated many years ago, no condition is permanent.

As always, my 2 cents

I really don't think the demand will come down, it may drop for sometime - web development is not just building websites, people just web technologies to write full fledged applications. People can hire you to debug their custom apps when their lead programmer is no more with them, you can be contacted to do something special that is not in the market.

Most companies now don't really care what you use to accomplish the task, they just want the stuff to work. As my2cents have rightly said, we need to build our own paypal or credit-card system, the government should pass laws that can make this possible and people will start working on the system.

The issue of fraud is a disturbing factor - I was in Nigeria recently for a training, I went to a cafe to check my emails and I was appalled at the number of young people and even mid-aged men that are into fraud(419). God help Nigeria