After posting Noise annoys, I started reading through the rest of my Practical Web Design columns, most of which rant about some area of web design that was irritating me at the time. I today unearthed a piece from way back in 2004, which—perhaps rather depressingly—remains totally relevant today: the way many web designers throw together sites in the likes of Dreamweaver, think it looks good enough, and then leave it at that.

As someone who’s hand-coded websites since 1996, it always amazes me how few web designers bother to learn the basics of their trade. But as my books on web design show, I feel that a strong foundation is essential in web design, and those designers who ignore this fact do so at their peril. (Note that Mark Boulton also regularly offers an interesting take on this subject, and his articles on grids and typography are essential reading for any serious web designer.)

Enjoy the article.

Craig Grannell explains that in the world of web design, ‘it looks good enough’ is simply ‘not good enough’.

It’s odd how a way of thinking becomes ingrained in a profession. In football, there’s the drinking and clubbing culture (gradually being taken over by clean living and mineral-water guzzling as more continental managers are dragged kicking and screaming into the English leagues); in many high-street stores, there’s a general opinion it would all be so much easier if there were no customers to bother the clerks (which perhaps explains why staff in many stores go out of their way to avoid you and pretend that you don’t exist); and with web design we have the ‘it looks good enough’ mentality.

The web design issue no doubt arrived from the browser skirmishes of the mid 1990s, when it was a small miracle if you managed to get a mildly complex site up and running in both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator. (And if you could somehow get a site working on the Mac, too, you were elevated in most people’s minds to the position of some kind of web god.)

Times change, however. Just as ‘yobbishness’ is fast becoming unacceptable in football, so web designers must now understand that ‘it looks good enough’ in many cases is simply ‘not good enough’. Truth be told, it never really was, but with the web being such a young medium, no-one knew any better at the time—and those few who did were ignored as designers seduced users with pretty colours and ‘cutting-edge’ animation, blinding them to the fact that a site was a pain to use. Or took ages to download. Or had the worst code in existence. Or for a visually-impaired person was the rough equivalent of being repeatedly hit with a stick and having someone yelling ‘No entry!’ at an annoyingly loud volume in their general direction.

Old habits die hard, though, and WYSIWYG tools encourage a kind of ‘oblivious to code’ approach. The level of importance afforded to visual design is massively inflated, and the suggestion seems to be that all those nasty HTML elements and CSS rules should remain in the realm of the geek.

I’m not suggesting that you uninstall your copy of Dreamweaver, hurl your install DVD out of the window and then burn it in some kind of sacrificial ritual to the great god of HTML. However, just as you should check under the hood of your car every now and again to see if everything’s OK, so too should you check under the hood of your website.

Crank up the code view in your web editor and see what the application’s spitting out. Learn some CSS and HTML, so you can fix any errors your editor makes, and make an effort to ensure your sites are accessible to all. (Remember: Google is effectively a user with disabilities, and relies on well-formed mark-up and logical structure to better search and rank a site).

So, instead of painting over the cracks, learn to create a solid foundation, because that’s the kind of thing that lasts. And in the long run, that benefits you, your clients, and your users.