Most good chefs believe that the food itself should contribute most of the taste. Seasoning serves to sharpen or enhance flavor. Instead, if seasoning is too strong, it covers up the flavor of the food.

I feel that way about web site design. Every site has its true purpose and content--the meat and vegetables, if you will. Design should help your visitors navigate your site and make it easy to follow and understand. Using design tricks for their own sake is like smothering a steak in garlic to the point where you cannot taste the meat.

When you design a site, the point is not to impress your visitors or to shock them. There is little or no entertainment value from strong color schemes or animated graphics.

Most web users are task oriented. They come to a site hoping to find some information, make a purchase, or what have you. The best designs are those that make it easier for the user to perform the desired task.

A liquid design is one where the content expands or contracts to fit the size of the user's screen. A solid design takes up a fixed number of pixels regardless of the size of the user's screen.

With a solid design, if you design for a wide screen, users with narrow screens will have to scroll back and forth, which is very difficult and frustrating. Most solid designs assume a narrow screen. This reduces the risk of users having to do back-and-forth scrolling, but it means that users with large monitors see a lot of wasted space on their screens.

For a liquid design, you should specify widths and heights using % rather than absolute numbers. When you use percents, the sizes of the elements on your page adjust to fit the screen of the user. I believe that with CSS you can obtain the degree of control that solid designers want without the rigidity of a solid design.