How to Design Websites

Preface

Do designers need to learn code? Should they code their own designs? After all, architects don’t build the houses they design, movie directors don’t shoot and edit their own motion pictures, and even Damien Hirst doesn’t paint his own spot paintings. It’s only down at the craft level – of illustrators, potters, jewellers and the like – that designers actually make things these days.

Of course, in the past designers have had lots of excuses not to learn code. The internet was designed by scientists, for scientists. Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, worked at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics. His main concern was to share research data with other professionals. When designers discovered the web, they ...