Ten clues you are working with a bad web "designer"

I've been silent for years while web designers have criticized web developers for "making bad design." My silence ends today. Of course web developers make bad design-- we're DEVELOPERS, not designers. You don't send a pilot to do crowd control, do you?

So, instead of pointing out how web designers make bad developers, I'd like to provide something more constructive-- a list of clues to help you distinguish between legit, skilled web designers and the rest of the poseurs.

Here's the list:

1) The entire index page, including the text copy, is one big image and an image map. (Good luck if you ever need to change that text copy-- I wonder how much they'll charge you for that?)

2) They use tables to control layout because CSS positioning is "just too hard."

3) Their idea of creating thumbnail graphics is to change the width and height attribute on the img tag. (Why do these thumbnails take forever to download?)

4) Their CSS file has one line in it, and it reads: body { background: #FFF; font-family: sans-serif; }

5) Their pages have no DOCTYPE, or even worse, an incorrect one (e.g. STRICT DOCTYPE, but the page has deprecated HTML tags in it).

6) They've never heard of the W3C, the online HTML Validator, or Tidy.

7) They think Tim Berners-Lee is "that guy from Mötley Crüe." (Semantic Web? Sorry, I don't listen to New Wave.)

8) They use frames.

9) When you try to talk with them about any technical or maintenance issues caused by flaws in their design approach, they cut you off by saying, "That's not OUR problem!"

10) When you hire a different designer for your next web project, you get email and voicemails like this: "HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO US? I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS!?"