"Things are going crazy in San Francisco", he said as we talked on the road near my office in the Santa Cruz mountains. My new aquantience was responding to what I was saying about the economy being slow in the Central Valley still. From what he told me it sounds like what is needed in the city is not designers but hardcore back end developers. Sign me up!
Web design/development work has two sides to it. Heads is the visible side where a designer works with the client to build a beautiful and functional website for them this is absolutely critical and a good designer is worth their weight in gold. Tails is the behind the scenes stuff that makes the site do more. ECommerce, data driven applicaitons, customer managed websites. Anything that allows things to be updated easily on the website would be part of a custom back end. Apparently they are hungry for this in SF, and it is a rare tallent here in the valley as well. At Inventaweb we work with several local deisgners to allow them to offer their clients more, but if you are looking for a someone to do a full project for you, why not just come to the source. :-)