Web Design Philosophies
Usability: All web sites must be web standards compliant, successfully validated and have overall valid written code. Images should be logical, simple, optimized and few. Images are to be as beneficial to the user as they are to the design. Accessibility goes hand in hand with usability. This means not using IE-specific tags, unnecessary Java applets and restricting page sizes.
Making a website accessible to all people can be as simple as making the website easy to use and navigate, as well as providing easy to read content that can be understood by all. A website should not force a person to use a certain program or have specific plug-ins just to make the site viewable. This does not mean that all images and animations should be removed. Instead, it is about making them useful and an integrated part of the design.
This is also important when designing websites for all browsers. Although a website may not look exactly the same in different browsers, it must be at least viewable. Even if the minority of people use an older version, there is little excuse to completely ignore them.
CSS: Cascading Style Sheets should be used in all websites, in combination with structural HTML elements. Tables have their purposes and should be used along with css formatting. Structural uses of css (e.g. using padding instead of a break tag) may cause viewing problems to older browsers who do not fully implement css.
How These Philosophies Developed
I began my web design career finding nifty javascript applets and showing them off on my personal website. No, I did not find the rippling effect applet nor use blink tags. The IE marquee scroll, however, was picked up. Thankfully, those bells and whistles did not last long before I began to get annoyed with them. Blindly building navigation systems, I went through many trial and error designs.
While interning at Mountain Media in 1999, I used Macromedia's Fireworks to create navigation systems with JavaScript rollovers. Although, now it is realized that this is not the most efficient way to build navbars, I did all I could to make the images small and pages efficient. After three months of interning, I was hired part-time as an after school job. It was during this time when I learned how to use and implement external cascading style sheets. I learned the differences in website viewing between browsers and operating systems. It was also here when I dabbled into some ColdFusion in relation to an e-commerce application.
Beginning in early 2002, I began using CSS intensively with my designs. I also took more simplistic approaches to websites, minimizing images and tables. It was at this time that I first learned how to build websites using CSS for structure instead of tables. Since then, Fireworks is not an installed application and efficiency & usability has become number one priority.
In the summer of 2003, I read Jakob Nielsen's Designing Web Usability. I fell in love with almost all of the elements and restructured my thoughts and feelings on web design. Also around this same time, I began using the Opera web browser instead of IE. Learning web browser issues also affected the way I designed websites.