Web Page Design

I often consider web page design to be the place where a person can really make something of themselves, unless of course they are being stupid.

There are many articles and tutorials written about how to be a better web page designer, but to me, it is simple:  Don’t be stupid.  I don’t believe this design principle has been covered as much as it should be.

Here are some pointers if, in fact, you truly desire to not be stupid.

  • Don’t use tables for anything other than tabular data.  If you don’t know what tabular means, you shouldn’t be designing websites.
  • Don’t let Dreamweaver (or any other IDE for that matter) write ANY code for you.  I guess you could, but that would be stupid, and we are trying to avoid that right now.
  • Always do cross browser testing DURING development. I can’t tell you how many times I see professional multi-million dollar companies release a product that doesn’t work in certain browsers.
  • Don’t integrate Flickr into any website if your clients or company doesn’t know what Flickr is.
  • If you ever use the <blink> tag, I’m surprised that you know how to use a mouse.  The <blink> tag is extremely stupid.
  • Never hire an expert and then tell them how to do their job.  They are the expert, and if they aren’t that experty (yes I know that is not a word, but sometimes I’m stupid too) then why did you hire them?  Just tell them what problems you want to address, and let them come up with some solutions.  Trust me they will be better than anything a non-expert could ever come up with.

The list is too long to continue.  Trust me, it is not that hard to realize when you are being stupid.  All you have to do is ask yourself “Am I being stupid right now?”  Oh yeah, if you don’t know the answer to that, it is a resounding YES!

One last thing, if you use Internet Explorer 6 as your main web browser, do the entire world a favor, and get addicted to World of Warcraft.  You have no hope of doing anything more productive on the Internet than achieving level 70.  IE6 is the epitome of Internet stupidity.