After reading the do’s and dont’s of web design, I’ve realized that clean, and not necessarily complicated, markup is the best to use on our websites. Being an inexperienced designer, it wasn’t as if I was using complicated markup on my web page, but to hear that websites don’t need overly-complicated, and therefore sloppy, markup in order to be successful was reassuring. I’m learning web design for the first time in this class, so I can’t say that I’ve developed any bad habits, or taken any shortcuts in making my webpage, because I haven’t developed any habits.
When you’re learning a skill on the fly, as I’m doing with learning to develop web pages in this class, it is paramount that you learn to do it the right way. Otherwise, you’ll develop bad habits and continue those bad habits in the future. For me, clean markup matters because it’s easier to learn a whole new language the right way as opposed to learning it the wrong way or developing bad habits while learning it.
As a user, I would prefer if web designers used “standards compliant” methods to design their web pages. Why? Because with technology changing so rapidly, web sites can be unusable because of their faulty, outdated markup. Which is frustrating to the user, especially if it was a past favorite. I want to be able to move quickly from one site to another and it is frustrating to get error messages or have downloads take forever, which is what happens when a site is developed using unreliable, or overly complicated, messy markup.