Wow, this piece below better highlights smart design techniques than anything that I have read in a very long time.

The difference between a good web designer and a great one is the ability to know how to take short cuts and save time without compromising the quality of work. Pixelsurgeon’s Jason Arber has put together 20 top tips and tricks you should be using to give your work that all-important professional edge.

1. Planning
When you’re itching to get started, it’s easy to overlook the most obvious step: planning. Whether it’s drawing wireframes and site diagrams in OmniGraffle or Visio, or even on a scrap of paper, you’ll save time by having an overview of your design at the site and page level before you start building. Obvious errors can be detected and solved before it’s too late to go back and it makes explaining your ideas to clients and colleagues a lot simpler than waving your hands in the air.

2. Do it by hand
Although there are some excellent tools around for building web sites, such as Adobe GoLive and Adobe (formerly Macromedia) Dreamweaver, professional code monkeys prefer to code by hand. Are they crazy masochists? Quite possibly.

There’s only one way to learn HTML, and that’s to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty with some actual code. But fear not: HTML has one of the easiest learning curves you’ll ever come across and you can create a basic web page with only a couple of lines. Writing code by hand also ensures that you write the leanest code possible, which is the ultimate aim of all HTML geeks…. [Source: netmag.co.uk]