The Importance of Design
Every web designer has some philosophies upon which he bases his designs. Some prefer to use Flash, while others a more AJAX-oriented design. I base all of my designs upon the following principles and technologies:
- XHTML -
- eXtensible HyperText Markup Language is a version of HTML rewritten to follow the XML guidelines. This means that the language is more esily readable by machines, while maitaining similar tags to original HTML.
- CSS -
- Cascading Style Sheets are a means by which a web designer can style a website. The advent of xHTML corresponds with the introduction and increasing support of CSS amongst modern web browsers. No longer does the HTML contain information for how data should look. Instead, xHTML structures date in a website, while CSS is used to provide it's "look." The benefits include easier human-readble and machine-readable HTML as well as "portable," styling.
- Web Standards -
- Web Standards are unofficial guidelines for the use and interpretation of HTML, xHTML and CSS (amongst other things) in modern web browsers. The Web Standards Project hopes to make websites more accessible and cross-browser compatabile, meaning one website looks the same across all web browsers without the need to tricky coding, nested table-based layouts or CSS hacks. It is an ambitious project that has yet to be fully realized though it is slowly gaining momentum.
- Lightweight Design -
- As this homepage displays, my designs are often lightweight through preference. I shy away from heavy javascript or server-side scripting simply because many of my clients' websites are simply means to convey relatively static data. As such I want the data to take precedence over flashy graphics or effects, creating a "lightweight" website.
- Hand Built -
- All of my website are coded by hand. Many websites are built using Integrated Development Environments (IDE's) such as Adobe Dreamweaver. Though these tools serve their own purpose, oftentimes they produce unnecessarily obtuse, cluttered, and non-web-standard code, which goes against my philosophy of lightweight, standards-adherent design.