The last few weeks has seen the whole web design world up in arms in debate about some of the key issues fac­ing designers/developers right now. Some of the biggest guns in the indus­try have been shed­ding light on the var­i­ous hot top­ics that we grap­ple with every day. Whether it be web design­ers who can’t code, design­ing in browser, or the eter­nal thorn in the side that is IE6.

Whilst I don’t for a sec­ond put myself in the same com­pany as the likes of Elliot Jay Stocks, Trent Wal­ton or Mea­gan Fisher, I do how­ever think that a hum­ble begin­ner such as I could con­tribute in some small way to the heated debate.

From what I have gleaned from my short time in the indus­try it seems that there are no set rules for a good or suc­cess­ful future in web design. Some design­ers code, some don’t. Some peo­ple still worry about IE6, some don’t. Some design­ers do every­thing in pho­to­shop and then try to mimic that in the browser, some do it all in the browser. I guess my point is that you have to tai­lor the way you work to suit you because, after all first and fore­most you need to enjoy your job.

For what it’s worth I per­son­ally do most of my design­ing in the browser. I start of with a rough mock-up in pho­to­shop then do the lions share of the design in notepad++ and fire­fox. I guess this is why I enjoy the cod­ing side of web design as much as the actual design part because for me they are intrin­si­cally linked. I am also a great believer in degrad­ing grace­fully, if peo­ple make the effort to have mod­ern browsers like fire­fox, chrome or safari then they will ben­e­fit by see­ing designs in all their glory. I don’t believe in hin­der­ing progress by pan­der­ing to IE.

Even though I am no fan of inter­net explorer in any of its incar­na­tions I believe that most peo­ple don’t use it because they pre­fer it, they use it because they don’t know that there are bet­ter alter­na­tives. So it’s up to us as an indus­try to edu­cate non-savvy web users and chan­nel our frus­tra­tion and anger into rid­ding the world of IE6.

So after all that the real point of this post was to high­light some recent articles/sites that for me have really “hit the nail on the head”. Firstly Trent Walton’s blog post enti­tled “Posi­tion absolute” really summed every­thing up far more elo­quently than I am able. Sec­ondly the site dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com wrapped it up in a nut­shell for me. And lastly, this arti­cle by David DeSan­dro showed a lat­eral way of approach­ing the IE6 dilema that I enjoyed.