I sometimes refer to myself as a web designer, a term that to many people I meet means "someone who makes websites pretty". This is a rather narrow definition and one I'd like to extend and widen and put in context with what us web professionals actually do. This blog post, the first in a series about building websites (or solving problems the way I look at it), covers some of my own thoughts regarding the trade of building websites and how a web professional or web designer thinks compared to print designers.

I occasionally indulge in computer games. It is not something I do regularly, but I'm always on the lookout for new titles that seem promising and spend my money on those instead of buying what's popular. I love the games that do not get as much attention as they deserve, but are brilliant and in many ways better than the big selling titles. Sometimes I play old games, often adventure games, just to marvel at the graphics or at what the game creators achieved with the limited hardware they had in those days. One of my all time favorite classic titles is the first of the Kyrandia games from Westwood Studios.

So called web standards-compliant coding using XHTML and CSS is being touted as the way of the future for web design and more and more people adopt the new methods and practices by the day. However CSS introduces a less than intuitive way to think about page layout which makes it hard to adopt and is also why web designers still use tables for layout. In this article I will cover some recent web design history, discuss why designers think with tables and why the CSS formatting model is not as intuitive as it should be.

I've been posting earlier about spam, and the measures taken to stop it, as well as the counter-measures taken by spammers. It's a war that has civilian casualties just like any other war, and in this case the users are the civilians. The measures to prevent spam introduce captchas and other methods which are making websites less and less usable and accessible, methods that make using many sites become a challenge for many.

Usability is interesting, not just because you learn a lot about how people think and feel but because you don't let bad application designers get away with it. People who work with usability are probably the hardest to satisfy, they will not accept a solution that is hard to use. Regular users on the other hand, often let their applications bully them into submission. In fact it's a sound conclusion to say that if more users had less respect for their applications people would generally feel less stressed at work.

When the idea of the World Wide Web was first conceived by Tim Berners-Lee it was the idea of the hypertext web. A network of documents with contextual links forming a mesh of information which supported retrieval and authoring of documents. Today with the popularity of blogs, wikis and the advent of AJAX and realtime interfaces we're seeing the way people use the WWW taking a new direction, a hybrid system that merges the document browser with the application viewer, a hybrid I'd like to call the "hyper-application system".

A lot of people have asked me how I come up with ideas for new designs. While I can't offer a generic recipe for getting ideas and turning them into design solutions, in this article I've tried to express my own thoughts about working creatively. Interaction design research today is very focused on developing methods for establishing and creating so called design spaces that support the creation of good design solutions. I approach web design in a similar fashion however not necessarily in such a theory-based manner.