Media want us to be enemies, but the truth is our work combined is what can save the World Wide Web of terrible websites that could have been awesome if the designer or developer would have been on the same page, or the owner had hire them and hadn’t tried to do it himself. So many PSD to XHTML conversion can be saved this way.

Our secret weapon is communication that is why here is our call of alliance to all web designers out there:

• Do not design a website who asks the user which version they’d like (high bandwidth or low, HTML or Flash) because it would rest quality to your work.
• Flash is just a tool, good for delivering animation, video, interfaces, shopping carts, functionality, to name a few, but this does not mean you need to create your entire website in Flash, and if you do you will be at a severe disadvantage to your wiser competitors. Thanks for HTML5 existence!
• Do not try to reinvent the website navigation this would only confuse the users and probably won’t come back and the client do not want that. Drupal themes can help you a lot!
• Please avoid using any type of music on your website: it is distracting, annoying and will probably drive away people, not to mention there is absolutely no reason for you include music unless you are a musician and in that case, set up a play list and give people the choice to play your tunes.
• Don’t distract your visitors with blinking or scrolling text, animated GIFs, or auto-loading sound; help the PSD slicing process. These could be distracting and the website won’t look so professional.
• Always keep your visitors’ interests in mind; after all they are the ones using it.
• Image backgrounds scream “amateur”, because it’s mostly amateurish sites that use them. Sometimes is very distracting too because people wants to know what is the image about and it would add load time to your page. The easy the PSD to XHTML conversion the better!
• Include a way to get back to the home page and a menu on every page, people likes to go back to the main page or look around the easiest way possible.
• Increase the line spacing to improve readability.
• Use a spelling checker even though you are a spelling genius they would always be a typo, Murphy’s Law.
• Don’t underline words if they’re not links and explain why you are linking it.

A great design can be unfulfilled because the CMS is not the right one; each one has their own limited capabilities that can be over done if you make a design too complicated. Keep things simple and real, there are different kinds of CMS’s that can support all kind of multimedia but for example a simple WordPress template won’t be enough.

It is time to wake up and see we both need coffee to survive; insomnia is a life style and clients are… great to deal with if we are together. So it is time to stop this foolish war because peace is not optional!