At about that point in the timeline of the Web any person building Web pages who doesn't recognize the variances between print design and site design is hopelessly superseded. It's obvious that internet pages aren't print pages, and many firms create special print style sheets so that their WebPages will print as nicely as they display in the browser. But there remain a lot of graphical designers out there who would like to persuade WebPages to have the static nature of a print design, and that's flatly very unlikely.

This is particularly true. If you learned the easy way to create designs in a medium where once it's sent to print, you cannot change it; it can be exceedingly hard to wrap your head around the indisputable fact that Web pages will look different in each browser, monitor, and PC that sees them. There's no possible way to check for each possible browser, monitor, PC, and OS mix available and accessing the Web. Attempting to do so will just result in frustration and insanity. But do not throw the Baby Out with the Bathwater!

There should be moderation on either side of the coin. Because you can not control all parts of a website design does not imply that you should not battle to govern any sides of it. And simply because the Web isn't print doesn't suggest that you should not use print design systems where acceptable. It's tricky to be a web site designer - whether you are trained in print design at first or site design from the get-go. Net browsers are awfully antagonistic places for design. Regardless of if you get a design pixel-perfect on your machine, the possibility is that your neighbour in the subsequent cube over will see variations in the design.

Where website designers go screwy
Website designers often hide behind the technology. Using the ins and outs of the media as an excuse for poor execution of your Web designs is a really bad idea. It is important to base your designs on sound design elements that've been evaluated and refined for centuries in the print world. WebPages have the same parts of design as print, and that the same problems can happen.

Print designers have a tendency to desire their designs to stay static - like they might if they were sent to the printer. Spending hours, days, or weeks attempting to get the pixels to line up precisely the same on Opera for Windows and Safari for Macintosh is a recipe for heart-ache and wasted time. It is important to make designs that degrade gracefully and handle less common circumstances well. This quote from "Figgy" in the comments of Mark Boulton's article sums up precisely where print designers go screwy : What a designer designs in Photoshop and presents to the customer on paper should be exactly what the customer sees on the screen after you complete the front-end coding. Figgy then goes on to suggest that it is just a simple case of knowing HTML and CSS. But that is just it.

Photoshop is a print designer tool; it creates designs which will stay the same irrespective of what.
The only possible way to take a Photoshop designed page and have it be "precisely what the customer sees on the screen" later is to reserve it as an image and load that as the internet page. And even then, there are browsers in use today that would still show the image differently or wrongly. (Ever attempted viewing these sorts of pages on a Web-ready cell phone?) What print designers should struggle for is to make the pages look great, and as near to the design spec as practical. While understanding that it is not possible to get it matching to a Photoshop design spec in each situation.

Good Designers Consider the fans
Another quote from Mark, this time in the comments below the draft: Good graphics designers consider the passing and try and provide a solution to the problem without regard for the delivery medium.

I might extend this to all designers. If you are a good designer, you are going to consider the fans and what the goals are for the project. As a web site designer, you have got to think about:
* Layout, navigation, and flow
* Interaction design
* Content, both pictures and text
* scrolling and linking
* User agents and operating systems of the shoppers

Good web site designers think about all those things and more when they're working on a design. As a designer you want to choose what sort of time is reasonable to spend making a design matching on diverse platforms. But you should not sacrifice design elements in working to get your design matching to the print mockup.