Professional standards have nothing to do with web design as related to you by your blog, to set a standard on design would be like telling Picasso to clean up his paintings. Besides, we do have a set of design standards that are enforced by the developers of the browsers we use, it’s called HTML 4, (now up to 5), and CSS. These standards dictate what we can and can’t do to our web design. The only limitations set by design is that which the mind can create.

So back to your blog on “standards”, the term Professional is coined for anyone who receives a payment for a service performed, technically this means you receive monetary funds, but the service could be a barter exchange or an item that furthers your career. So does this mean that the college athlete who gets a free education to play football is a professional? In my opinion, yes. Others will disagree of course… Perhaps this blog would be better titled as “Professional or Amateur: Considerations on Design”

This is a blog post, which was part of an ongoing discussion in the industry. Of course it’s opinion. But seriously, you don’t think there should be some professional standards for selling web design? You think people who don’t understand the ins and outs of navigation, layout, typography, SEO etc. should be charging others for their work?

This post was written 5 years ago. I actually think this is less of a problem now than it was in 2006.

Well, I see my post has struck a chord with you! Keep in mind that this is a blog post, not an article or “paper” (and 4 years old!). I agree that the tone is a little confrontational, but that comes out of years of seeing businesses getting ripped off by people selling a poor quality product. Once you’ve been in this industry for a few years I’m sure you’ll understand.

As for some examples of poor site designs, I normally prefer not to single out particular examples. However, I do frequently review sites at The Webmaster Forums. On this site, I have some examples of good design as well as a review of some major 2010 Olympics websites.

Where would one goto to read up on the standards and such.

I have two sites up currently, my personal joseffbetancourt.com and my hobby site URTournament.org and I’d love to imporve them with standard based design.

It is a challenge to reach out to those people. How do you find them when they’re not looking to improve or don’t even feel they need to? From the other end we can also try reaching out to business owners – the people who buy web design – and teach them about what good web design is.

I really love the Web Evangilsm stuff they’re doing at Opera. I actually applied for a job there I would have moved to Norway for that! I think now they’ve moved that part of the company to India now.

Initiatives from major companies such as Yahoo!, Microsoft and Opera are very welcome, too. When they send folks on the road to do true education and not just product hawking (go see Nate Koechley (Y!) and Chris Wilson (MS) for example, and insights and perspectives can really change. What’s more, sharing of technology is imperative. This is something some companies are doing really well and we need to keep encouraging them to do so – they have the resources independents such as myself do not.

At any rate, this is obviously a concern near and dear to my heart. Thanks for keeping the conversation going.