Teaching Web Standards
July 24, 2008Schools are misleading students when it comes to web design. With the exception of a few, most colleges and universities teach students how to move boxes around a graphical editor with little or no fundamental instruction on core web design principles. These students leave school thinking that knowing Dreamweaver makes them web designers, proudly proclaiming this skill on their resumes.
Some will soon find out that what they were taught was not actually web design, but a shortcut to publishing HTML files. Others will move on to companies that don’t know any better and use their new skills to publish bloated, unusable websites (which their bosses will love) that stain the web with bad markup and code.
So what should schools be teaching? This is a difficult question to answer. Some would argue that not all programs require heavy course work in web design—Dreamweaver and other graphical programs allow students to “get their feet wet” and enable programs that don’t have specialized faculty to offer web design classes. While this is true, it still gives students a false-sense of what it actually takes to put together a well thought-out, user-focused website. Whether the classes are taught through Journalism schools or specialized web and graphic design programs, web standards need to be at the forefront of the curriculum. Students should be taught the ins and outs of semantic HTML and how to write that code without the aid of a graphical editor. They should learn about page layout, color theory, typography, usability and information architecture. These are the skills of real web designers—people that understand how the web works and how to build pages that make information easy to find.
So how does your school teach web design? If they are still teaching with Dreamweaver or (god forbid) Frontpage, then a review of the curriculum is long overdue. There are plenty of resources out there on standards-based web design, here are a few to get you started.