I recently had a fun experience—Michael Eagar and I sat down to talk about web design, coding, and templates. He asked me to show him some of the things I was talking about, and so we opened up a text editor and I started to write the code for a basic two column template from scratch. I didn’t refer to my normal templates or previous designs other than for a few hard-to-remember strings (like the text for my XHTML Doctype).

I had an amazing time and I produced amazing code.

By starting from scratch with my web design and doing my best to teach Michael some best practices, I was able to focus on the best way to do things, not just the way that everything was already done on my site and that would be a pain to change.

We cranked through the HTML and CSS, including personal instruction and most of the visual layout (sans-images) in less than two hours.

Visually Starting From Scratch

Avalonstar, SimpleBits, and others have recently toasted the CSS file for their sites and thrown all their presentation out. They did this as a kick in their own pants to get them moving and working on a new design that they will (hopefully) like better than the old one. Both Bryan and Dan talked about how liberating it was to start fresh on a new design for their site.

Mini-Paradigm Shifts

Coding from zero, or designing from a blank slate, isn’t always what’s necessary. In fact, be very, very careful not to discard all the things you’ve learned from your previous designs. However, being willing to question or let go of previous designs, methods, and ideas about web design can be liberating and trigger a mini paradigm shift—you may discover new ways of doing things that will increase your productivity and your designs’ effectiveness. So take a step back every once in a while and examine how things are done. If you really are doing things the best way, then you can be confident in the current system. If you aren’t, then you’ve found (and can begin to remedy) a potential problem or bottleneck.