What kind of hippie wears leather jackets to the burger stand, anyway, hippie?

Thus the beholder is not the purchaser of our services but the one sipping the well-crafted coffee or the perfectly concocted meal. In short, the people we choose to work with must be craftsman themselves. Insofar as our work on the website allows them to do their thing, we succeed. If the odd visitor is delighted by the attention to detail on the site, the care and expertise evident in its preparation, so much the better. Perhaps a new customer or two results and the cycle will continue.

In the consumption of other goods and services, it seems like there’s a lot more knowledge on the customer’s part regarding the respective quality of various clothiers, or restaurants, or furniture designers, or automobile manufacturers, etc.

It’s quite possible that in web design, the beholders are other web designers. That doesn’t do much for our bottom line.

Fair enough for tomato sauce, but this seems plainly wrong for the Black Label Burger: If you like burgers, you will appreciate, love, and prefer that burger (or so I hear).

In both cases, though (as in the Schott case, I’d say), craft requires a beholder who, for economic reasons, is not the same person as the craftsperson and is paying for the crafted product.

So, my questions: Who is/are the beholder(s) in the case of web design? Programming? Copywriting? Is that act of beholding invisible to the beholder(s)? In other words, are there some activities within the web umbrella which split economic relations from appreciation of craft? If so, does that affect web culture in a way that makes it different from food culture? If so, how?