I can’t tell you how many times that my programming experience (in Java, PHP etc) has guided me in my web design work … and strangely, even in other aspects of my life not at all related to topics ‘nerd’.

… Ah, nerd wisdom prevails in all aspects of life.

Anyway, here yet again, is another example where programming guides me: this time, it’s all about web design and code.

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Over the last few years, the consensus in the web design community has been to streamline code. In real terms, that comes down to:

• collapsing html
• collapsing css
• … and consolidating css code into one file, to minimize the number of server hits.

… The idea is to speed up web page load times and to reduce web server loads.

This is an important goal and something all web designers should be concerned about. The problem is that if you are concentrating on optimizing your CSS or HTML to speed things up, you are concentrating on the wrong parts of your websites.

The fact is, that most of the optimization opportunities is actually found in your images, Flash movies and other multimedia content – not the code.

(more…)

Web design has been transformed over the last many years. In many ways, the skills a web designer needed in 1996 are totally different from the skills you need in 2007 … and the foreseeable future.

I won’t go into what you needed in the past, because it matters not. So let’s talk about what you need to know today, to be a complete and competitive web designer.

The Web Designer’s Study Guide:

1. HTML
2. CSS
3. PHP
4. Javascript

(more…)

I’ve seen this confusion come up from time to time – is HTML a scripting language?

Short answer: no.

Yes a nerd detail, but nonetheless, this is something that should be made clear.

THE DETAILS:

HTML is actually a markup language and not a scripting language.

Scripting implies decision making capabilities (the code can actually evaluate and take an action based on what it finds) – PHP, PERL, Ruby, Javascript are examples of scripting languages.

Markup languages create structure for a document … they only describe data. For example:

• HTML
• XHTML
• XML

… but you knew that already.

[;)]

Stefan Mischook

In this podcast, I discuss the 3 reasons why learning to hand code your web pages makes sense … and dollars too! 

Podcast running time: 7:30

Download MP3 link: 3 Reasons to hand code

Thanks,

Stefan Mischook