Practical Web Design - Fundamentals of Web Design

I was sitting on the porch with my old Aunt Gracie one afternoon, sipping corn liquor and swapping tales about the old days, when the topic turned, surprisingly enough, to Web design.

"You young whippersnappers have fergot about everything that worked good back in the old days of the Internet," she snarled, fixing me with one watery blue eye. She hocked a good one in the general direction of the spit can and went on.

"All this Flish and Flash and graphics jumpin' around every which way and picters lungin' out of the screen at me, forty-leven different colors swirlin' round every which way, it's enough to make an old lady like me want to switch off my old two-banger PC and go in for a nap. I 'member when Web pages used to make sense. I could load one up, get what I needed offen it, and go on 'bout my business. Nowadays I cain't make head nor tail of what half the pages out there are tryin' to get across, and I ain't got the patience to sit and figger it all out. I'd ruther spend my evenin's chasin' weasels out of the tomater patch."

I usually try to keep my distance from Aunt Gracie and her spit can, but what she said that afternoon made good sense. There are some fundamentals of basic Web design that are just as applicable today as when trailblazers like Aunt Gracie were hacking their way through the electronic underbrush...

The article is broken into 2 parts: