After the the Dot Com crash, it wasn’t just investors that didn’t want to touch tech or the internet, but businesses as well. Back then, it wasn’t perceived as a proven viable business model as it is now. In the current financial atmosphere, businesses are more careful with their spending, but fortunately for the industry they’re not completely gun shy.

Eighteen months after the Crash of 1929, most people thought that recession had peaked too. There’s a great website called “News from 1930″ (now up to 1931) that chronicles stories from the Wall Street Journal of that time that sound like they could have been taken from today’s: lots of attention paid to good news from certain industries, ignoring the bad overall employment and debt numbers, and talking about how “this time it’s different.” It wasn’t, and it probably isn’t.

But to the main point: I don’t expect web-based businesses to suffer in this depression as much as others, because we don’t tend to have the same vulnerabilities that many manufacturing and service industries have today: high debt levels and a dependence on cheap labor. You don’t have to borrow a lot of money to start most web businesses, which means you can survive a lean month a lot better than the guy whose factory belongs to the bank. You also can’t hire the cheapest workers you can get and compete on price alone; quality has to be the primary focus.

Which isn’t to say we’ll be unaffected, but I think we’ll do better than most as long as we do good work. The biggest difference I’ve seen in my clients who own websites is the advertising money they’re getting. Advertisers used to throw hundreds of dollars at them just based on the fact that the site looked good. Now they’re asking for stats and calculating their conversion rates and figuring out whether each ad is pulling its weight. That’s changed considerably in the last couple years, and I think site owners and the developers they hire will have to pay close attention to that and make sure the advertising they sell is worth the price.

Alex is right that a lot of the web design (and development, programming, etc.) business is badly run. I wouldn’t hire most of the web designers in my town to mow my lawn (and if I did, they’d fail to show up or mow off the flowers or something). I suppose that’s the downside to a totally unregulated industry: there’s no barrier to entry for anyone with the talent and drive to do the work, but there’s no barrier to anyone else either. But if you do good work and provide good service, people will find you — often after getting burned by someone who had more advertising budget than know-how.