Resources, tips, and standards for Web design

In a cleverly postmodern way, the Web is a great source of information on Web design. I am not a web designer (and I can hear real designers shouting `no kidding!'), but the Web is an unreasonably democratic medium, which means that it lets me in along with all of the other riff-raff. I wanted a Web page, so I needed to design it; or more accurately, I needed a coherent site of web pages, designed and implemented. You're looking at them.

What-to's

I designed this site with four goals in mind:

Simplicity. This is manifested in two ways, for two reasons. First, I want the site to be readable without a lot of clutter. Second, and even more important, I have not intention of spending much time fiddling with this. After all, I have work to do.
Usability. If I (or you, I suppose) wants to find something here, it should spring immediately to hand. Navigation and layout should be helpful, not gewgaw overload.
Modularity. Okay, I'm still a software engineer somewhere in my heart. Modularity helps keep pages in the site consistent with minimal cutting and pasting, which is a tedious and risky process.
Conformance. To a network geek, this seems like simple common sense. There are standards for Web markup, so why not use them?

How-to's

The World-Wide Web Consortium is the central clearinghouse and police station for Web standards. This includes the HTML used to mark up these pages, and the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) that describes their style.

Modularity is courtesy of CSS and PHP, a server-side scripting language that I use to cobble together each page from a set of standard components, plus individual page content and a wee dab of glue.

Glish offers lots of information on CSS techniques.
ALA (A List Apart) also has a wealth of CSS information.
The Layout Reservoir at Blue Robot.
the Web Developer's Virtual Library offers style resouces. Of particular interest is a recommendation to replace table layout with CSS positioning.

Principles

There's no doubt about the title: Web Pages that Suck is not bashful about its opinions. The premise of WPTS is learning by counterexample: Vincent Flanders, the designer of the site and author of the books, shows bad web page designs and explains what is wrong with them.

Standards and conformance

I have run this page through the HTML validator at the World-Wide Web Consortium, and found no errors. Assuming I have kept the validation up to date, that means that this page is verified valid XHTML 1.0.

I have checked the CSS used to format this page with the online validator provided by the World-Wide Web Consortium, and found no errors. Again, assuming that I've kept the validation up to date, that means the underlying CSS is valid.

The two validations together add up to this: if the page looks wrong, either my design is wrong, or your browser is. If you think the problem is mine, let me know. If it's your browser, let the vendor hear about it.