People build websites for many reasons: to reach a wider audience; to sell, promote, or express; to appease peer pressure. Novelty stopped being a reason circa 2001. In its place, we have of course: of course I have a website; of course you have to have a Facebook wall, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile, or Pinterest board; of course we all have email. And, of course, web design uses HTML and CSS — two languages with which browser makers...

I earned my BFA in ’98. Learned to layout feature pages and create infographics for the local daily paper. I earned a Photoshop ACE in ’03. My most recent full-time contract was pure mock-up design work. Yet for the last year and a half I have debugged code 40–50 hours a week. I read about code, I wrote about code, I talked to other people about code. Imagine that: a non-coder figured it out. Still, “write code” is a broad phrase. Some...

InDesign boxes are as simple as click-and-drag. Photoshop’s layers let painters color pixels anywhere they please. But layout with HTML and CSS is a game of nudging and cascading. It happens every day: Photoshop-savvy art directors mock up designs, honing their spacing, carefully choosing appropriate typefaces and colors. They hand off their work to an eager HTML developer, who announces that the design will likely take days to turn...

By nature, the web is a chaotic place where people hop from page to page at will. Unfortunately, this freedom can work against those websites whose content is best followed in a certain order. Design techniques make it possible to direct users along a path with varying degrees of persuasion. But when is it best to direct users, and how? What defines linear content? You’re reading some now: articles are akin to streams of thought presented in...