Last month, I did a sit-down interview with an aspiring web designer, fielding all sorts of questions and offering my own insights as I enter my fourth year in the industry. At one point, we hit the subject of the importance of web standards, structuring and coding layouts to work in every browser and future-proofed to an acceptable degree, and why tables should not be used to do layouts anymore.

This is where I heard a statement that kind of jarred me.

“Oh I know, I make MySpace layouts….” - it brought my brain to a halt.

It wasn’t anything personal with her, but it was the realization I had that there are likely 1000s of young people just like her also doing the same. Some people are even making a career / making money off making MySpace layouts.

So why is this harmful to impressionable minds?

For starters, MySpace was never designed with the intent that a user would be able to toss the site theme in favor of something of their own design. To make one, you basically have to unlearn everything you knew about HTML and CSS in regards to site layouts or themes. For those who haven’t done anything with websites before, learning all the ins and outs of how to get a myspace layout to work are filling their heads with useless crap. Other social networking sites such as Virb are designed to allow the user to apply their own stylings in a non-insane way. I was actually quite impressed with Virb because it also allows you to disable all custom layouts at your discretion- something MySpace can’t do.

My best advice to her was to ditch MySpace layouts all together, and purchase a cheap web hosting account with Wordpress. She would then at least have full access to change anything in the site layout while learning invaluable knowledge and design at the same time. That’s how I got started 12 years ago on Geocities (remember them?).

Could you imagine if there were sites that let you code your own add-ons, and it required you writing some screwed up PHP or Coldfusion that wasn’t accepted anywhere else in the world? How about a home builder who didn’t follow industry standards when building your home?

Can you believe some colleges still teach web design using tables and code generating software? Crazy isn’t it? It was like that when I was there and from what I’ve heard, not much has changed.

The thought of people having to do absurd CSS and table structuring just to make the myspace layout look a certain way just disturbs me. We have standards for a reason, and one of those reasons is to not repeat the sordid browser wars of the 90s which is where a lot of that mess stems from.

So for all you folks out there looking to get into web design, young or old, if you’re going to do something do it right. Refer to the giants: Zeldman, Meyer, Snook, Cederholm, etc… strive for greatness.