In the wild west early years of the web, anything might have flown because the most important thing was to just get online. As competition for ad dollars and visitor attention becomes more and more fierce online, that has changed. More and more graphic designers are going to play a bigger and bigger role in the web, because they have the talent of making a message easy to convey, pleasing to look at, and a snap to read. Yes, those who know HTML and CGI programming call themselves designers. But coding is not design.
Coders seem resistant to the fact that there is a long history to graphic design and to marketing.
And that history is not suddenly irrelevant just because there is a new medium. Undoubtedly, I will now be flamed by angry coders who say I am maligning their skills. But I do think coders should be spending as much energy developing new tools that allow better images, beautiful typography, and various graphic flourishes to be possible with standard Internet tools. Pages that twisted and turned impossibly. Thankfully, it wasn't very long before big firms and smart smaller firms called the graphic designers back.