Creativity and Logic in One Career: Website Development!
- Nela Friesen
- Sep 19, 2025
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 24, 2025
Table of Contents
About Brendan and Grizzly Media
Brendan is the owner and operator of Grizzly Media, a technology company located in Lethbridge. The company designs websites for many companies, mostly around Lethbridge, but some companies in other areas of Canada as well. Along with designing websites, they also do things like lead generation, marketing, and logos and branding.
What is working in this industry like?
An Average Day
After Brendan gets to work in the morning, he starts his day with a tea before working on whichever bigger project he's working on at the moment for a few hours. He then checks his emails in the late morning and deals with any small issues that have come up. He takes care of all the small things like fixing issues on a website, answering questions, or working on quotes and proposals. Along with working on these tasks in the afternoon, his afternoons will also often include meetings with his employees or clients.
Pay
The pay is good in this industry because the work they do is quite specialized. To be a web developer, you need to know how to code, how to troubleshoot any problems, how to design the page to be user-friendly, etc. There is quite a lot of training that is needed, which contributes to higher wages, as well as the fact that it can be competitive because it's harder to find good people to do good work. Looking at the ALIS website, jobs relating to web design or development have average wages of $30 to $45 per hour.
Work Conditions
It is collaborative work because at his company, there is a team that works on each project. Brendan is the project manager and developer, so he gets the team organized. He will meet with his coworkers, who each have various roles, to coordinate with them on what their tasks are for the project and what the client needs. There is also a lot of collaboration with the clients because they have to communicate what they need in regards to pages, writing, and functionality, and also provide pictures for their website, etc.
Brendan is self-employed as he runs his own business, so there isn't really a set number of hours per week. It really depends on the season and how many projects are coming in. He is also able to be more flexible with his hours and take time off if he needs to, due to being self-employed.
This is not a very stressful job for Brendan because if there are any problems, they are usually very easily fixed. They have access to websites to make quick and instant fixes, making it a very easy process. He prides himself on sticking to time commitments and deadlines so the customers don't have to get frustrated that their projects are taking too long. However, the stress levels can also depend on the clients. Working with larger e-commerce clients can be a bit more stressful because you are dealing with things like their payments, so if something goes wrong, it could have a much bigger effect on their business.
Qualities Needed
Problem-solving is one of the most important qualities needed in this industry. There can be many technical issues that arise as you develop and design websites. There will also be many unique situations that you haven't dealt with before, so being able to go online and research is also a very valuable skill. It's important to be able to find and sort through information online to find what you are looking for. Being able to adapt quickly as the customers' needs change is also important to customer satisfaction. You can't give up or get frustrated easily in this industry.
Hardest Parts of the Job
The sales aspect of running his own business is difficult for Brendan. He himself knows the value of a good website and good marketing, but it can be hard to communicate that to potential clients to get sales. This is a harder part of owning your own business in this field, as many people just want to design and create. However, when you run your own business, you also have to sell your service or hire someone to do it for you.
How is this Industry Rewarding?
It is really fun and interesting to be able to create nice visual designs and bring them to life. Brendan also really enjoys the technical side; structuring the website, figuring out how to make all the parts work together, and how to make it easy for clients to use so that they can manage their own website. Between building and designing, the creativity, and working together with clients and helping them reach their goals, it is a very rewarding job.
Misconceptions
A relatively new misconception has emerged with the rise of AI. Many people believe that they can get AI to write code and build websites, etc. Brendan would disagree with this idea because he believes that while AI has its place and can certainly be very helpful, it cannot replace human qualities like problem-solving, quickly dealing with issues as they pop up, and creativity. A lot of human creativity, expertise, and troubleshooting is critical for a project to be successful.
When you are trying to learn how to code, avoiding AI as much as possible is very helpful. Just copying and pasting code from AI is not very helpful in learning how it actually works, so it's important to learn coding without AI first. If you know how to do your own coding, then you can use AI tools to help you. This way, if the AI gives you something that doesn't work or doesn't look right, then you have the knowledge to figure out what's wrong.
Post-Secondary
Brendan started his post-secondary journey with the computer science program at the University of University. It wasn't quite the right thing for him personally, so he ended up switching majors to New Media, which covers things like graphic design, video production, 3D animation, and website design. He found this personally more engaging and interesting. He was able to try all those various aspects within New Media and pursued website design after graduation because he really liked both the creative side and especially the technical side, writing the code and making the website work. He continued pursuing website design until he eventually was able to start his business and design websites for his clients. His education was a four-year program, but it took him about five years to complete it because he took some breaks for things like travel in between. Although he took the university route, there are also other ways to enter the industry, like college or online courses.
This is not a very hard industry to enter because it is pretty easy to get started. The only thing you really need is a computer, which is something students either own or have easy access to. There are also many online courses and tutorials to make this career really easy to try out to see if it's something you could actually be interested in.
What can High School Students do to prepare?
In high school, problem-solving and research are skills and qualities that you can practice and prepare for success in this industry. There are also platforms like Squarespace or Wix, for example, that make it very easy to build websites. As soon as possible, build small websites for people you know or small businesses for a cheaper price or even for free, because this will get you experience, help you practice, and it will help you begin to build a portfolio of your work.
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