To design, or to code, that is the question
Everybody has a true passion: some like to collect stamps, others enjoy to read a good book and drink a glass of wine. The same goes for web-designers. There surely is a part of our job that we like best, be it to draw a neat illustration or to code some clean, semantic code. Although the profession we pursue offers a broad range of different activities basically the fundamental question might always be: Do you like best to design or to code?
For my own part I really favor the latter. This is perhaps down to the fact that I don’t have an educational background whatsoever at my job (like many of us). Everything I know is self-taught. Although I’m really proud of that I wished there either was such an education when I started to design websites about 15 years ago or that I had enough time nowadays to catch up on. Of course I am still learning and everyday I try to discover something new, but nothing replaces a profound education, especially concerning art and design. I undoubtedly have an unerring eye for that and considering my daily condition I’m also able to come up with some nice designs, but the basics just lack.
But that’s not the only reason why I love to code. It’s more technical, it’s based on facts. And it just plain feels great to build a simple, semantic foundation with HTML(5) and then equip it with some great CSS(3). I sometimes hardly can’t believe what the stylesheets have made out of the source code when I look at it. But not only that: When I code time simply flies by (which sometimes also is a disadvantage of course).
What about you? Is it your passion to design a website or to code it afterwards? And why? I’d be delighted to read your story.