Web Design Philosophy
Less is more, and usability is job one.
In my early Web design experience, I found that I needed to resist the urge to make every Web page a showcase for the latest and greatest techniques. No matter how cool a site looks, if it's difficult to use then it is badly designed. If it is completely inaccessible to a large portion of your audience, it is also badly designed. And if its main purpose is to be visually stunning, then it may be a work of fine art - but it is not necessarily good design.
As a designer, it's easy to feel that creating good design means developing unique and visually stunning sites. But that is far from the whole story, and an emphasis on visual effects can conflict very directly with your site's usability. There are certain temptations that are hard to resist: Flash sites without HTML equivalents, cool JavaScript navigation that is useless to anyone who has turned off JavaScript in their browser, or big, fat, beautiful backgrounds and images that don't communicate but only decorate at the expense of bandwidth. But a Web site's primary job is to communicate. The quality of interaction a user has with your site determines the rate of return visits. No matter how pretty it is, if your users can't find what they want, then it is a badly designed site.
All of the rules that apply to good print design apply to the Web. (And there are plenty of other rules that need to be learned as well.) But my point is, you don't die cut, emboss, varnish and use full color on every printed piece just because you can. So why should you do the equivalent on the Web?
I tried to make this site an example of what I feel good design is really about. It looks good, it's easy to use, and things are where you would expect to find them. I've coded to standards and used CSS for layout as opposed to tables. As a result, design and content are separated and rolling out a new look-and-feel will be as easy as tweaking the CSS.
There are tons of web sites out there saying what is good and what is bad about what they see on the web. So I won't spend any time here discussing why frames are such a drag, why semantic markup is important, why you should validate your code, etc. But I would like to direct you to some of my favorite sites on Web design where you can read about those topics and many more. If you are interested in learning more about Web design, or if you are considering becoming a professional Web designer yourself, you should definitely check out the links I've provided on this page, top right.