What makes a usable and enjoyable website experience? Ultimately a design's success it based on how the user interacts with it. Something that is beautiful but unusable has lost its users and possibly angered them, which could result in them never coming back to see the more user friendly design you create to stop upsetting them...

I'll admit that I am not one that quickly accepts change. Looking at job postings it seemed that everyone had div lust. Tables were what I had become used to and it seemed that as long as it worked why bother figuring some other way out that on the surface seemed more complicated, especially with the assistance of Dreamweaver with tables. When I started my job three weeks ago it was heavily stressed that tables would not be tolerated. So I figured, as long as I'm going to do this I might as well do it right and understand what the big deal is...

Occasionally my wife feels the need to lose weight, such as after our son was born. What my wife likes to do is go shopping and find a pair of pants that she loves and get them in the size she wants to be rather than her current size. She then lovingly refers to these pants has her "motivation pants". She knows that when she has worked hard and slimmed down that she has a reward waiting for her. She also knows that she has clothes that are prepared for her new size.

A little while ago, when giving advice to a friend who was working on his portfolio site, the question came up about how much do you "give away" on your site to sell yourself? As an artist he was concerned that putting too much on his site was basically just giving his ideas away. Considering his content was entirely visual (hand drawings and Photoshop) it was easy to give the quick response that even if people tried to steal his artwork, they wouldn't be able to reproduce his style and that if anyone wanted the real deal they would have to go to him. However, shortly after I stopped patting myself on the back for the great response, I started to really think about the seriousness of the question. Sure, if anyone wanted consistent artwork that looked like his they would have to go to him, but what about a website that showed work for websites?

My mouse, upon release, likes to randomly double or possibly even triple click. This provides for some interesting situations, such as clicking a link that moves you to a different location on the same page and the mouse is conveniently located on top of an ad that it then clicks on (because the change was instant since the page was already loaded). It is also a great way to find out which of my programs allow you to close without saving. Closing a window has a new level of excitement. So who's fault is this?

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. This needs to be the motto of anyone creating anything. When creative decisions are making limitations on who can use your website without actual reason, that seems like a waste of potential viewers or customers. My understanding of web design is to start from the worst case scenario and work your way up, that way you know it will always look good or at least be functional. The difference between newer and older browsers means things may shift around and transparencies may not work but all basic functionality will usually be maintained. However, things like html have become somewhat of a web standard, so it's going to work in some form on everything. Adobe Flash has not reached that status, yet many sites use it as though it has...

In one of his performances, the late comedian Mitch Hedberg tells a story about T.V. executives coming up to him after one of his performances, telling him he did a great show, and then asked him if he wrote scripts. His response was, "That's not fair. That's like being a chef, spending your whole life learning to be the best cook, and people coming up to you and saying 'So you can cook, but can you farm?' "

Normally I wouldn't use this as a platform to gripe because I would like to pretend that I am more civilized than that, but it's time to give a lesson that was emphasized strongly while I was in school and is still actually applicable outside of the classroom (unlike the MLA format, or Philosophy). That simple lesson is alignment.

One of the easiest ways to find inspiration when you're wanting to create something is to see what other people are doing. Today I was looking for something to spark my creativity for a new web design, so I was looking at different template sites. After endless sifting I finally came across one that got me willing to create. There were a couple things about the design I saw that I wanted to tweak and the assets I was using required me to shift some things around significantly. However, when I was done I felt that I had created something that, while obviously different, still captured many of the core ideas that I liked from my inspiration.