Designing within constraints of (x)html: When you lay out a print ad, you place images where they belong on page, draw out any shapes, lay out colors, and place text. Then you print it out and make copies. Every copy you hand out looks exactly same, and there’s nothing magic about way things stay on page. In web design, everything is held in place by code. You could easily have a four to one ratio of code to content. If you are not familiar with coding involved in keeping your site looking like it’s supposed to, it can be very frustrating laying out your design.

Accessibility: Back to our perfect world – not only would browsers be perfect, but all our viewers would look through same eyes. Unfortunately, some people aren’t blessed with good eyesight or motor skills like you and I. We need to consider that for those who have disabilities, a poorly laid out website can be completely useless. You could ignore that audience, but you would be doing yourself a disservice. And let’s not forget, our biggest and most important group of users is completely blind: search engine spiders. They read your website same way a blind person does. If layout of your site isn’t logical, a spider may leave and not bother coming back for a long time.

J Hancock is the president and founder of HighTide Web Services. We are proud to be a fast growing, California based web services firm, offering high quality web site templates from some of the best designers out there, as well as excellent and affordable web hösting