Communicate, don't decorate.
The sooner a web designer learns to communicate with their designs using only what's necessary and relevant, rather than decorate for the mere purpose of decorating, the sooner you'll find your designs will motivate your site's visitor, rather than just satisfy the designer's eye.

Reading through the text provides at least a basic idea of how the text can be integrated into a website, avoiding the disconnect between the writing and the design of a website.

Details make a great developer/designer.
If there's one thing I've learned over the course of my career more than anything else, it's this simple philosophy: If you have time and talent to care for the smaller details, it almost always means you've already cared for the bigger details. If you have time and talent to readjust the logo positioning 1px to the left, it likely means you've already solidified usability, cross-browser compatibility, and so on.

When it comes to laying out text on a screen, sans serif fonts are almost always the best bet, especially if you chose a font like Verdana that was designed for display on a computer screen. Serifed fonts have a higher chance of displaying poorly, becoming blurry or even pixilated.

Browser compatibility...
No browser as yet supports 100% of the HTML Version 5 standard, but some browsers come closer than others. Over the past few years Internet Explorer has done a much better, though Firefox and Safari has done arguably the best job. In addition, the HTML standards usually run ahead of what the browsers support.

But since support for the latest HTML tags isn't universal, take great care in building your pages with parts of the language that not all browsers understand, to assure that most browsers will not ignore that part of your page it can't translate, and your page will be displayed unaffected.

The basic rules for translating HTML documents are established by the World Wide Web consortium, which publishes the official HTML standards. But there's considerable room for interpretation within those ground rules.

Those who code XHTML/CSS
as well as they design will always have an edge over those who only design. You're able to foresee potential layout and coding issues while the comp is still being designed. The benefits of such are rarely overrated, as time and money is saved and frustration is minimized.

To save work, use libraries of basic code that can be modified or customized for a specific application. This approach yields more reliable and consistent code and increased productivity by eliminating some routine steps.

When making changes to the source code and other team members are involved, it is a best practice to insert comments in the source code so that others can understand the program more easily.

When debuging your code,
strip down to the base element and work up. I've found it extremely useful over the course of my career to comment out everything except the element that you think is the cause of the problem.

Once I'm positive that element displays properly (or isn't the problem), I uncomment the next containing element.

Once that element is working properly in tandem with the previous element, I uncomment the next element. And so on. A simple technique, no doubt, but often a useful one.

The debuging skill of the programmer can be a major factor in the ability to debug a problem, but the difficulty of software debuging varies greatly with the complexity of the system, and also depends, to some extent, on the programming language(s) used and the available tools. There are software tools which enable the programmer to monitor the execution of a program, stop it, re-start it, set breakpoints, change values in memory and even, in some cases, go back in time.

Know thy type.
Typography can make or break a site. Coupled with CSS, typography is an incredibly powerful layout too, and not just something reserved for body copy.

When someone visits a website you've designed, the odds are that they don't care much about the colors, images or sounds, they're immediately looking at the text.

Typography is easily overlooked, and even when a designer does take it into consideration, it's easy to write off as a time-intensive activity with little return. But spending even a few minutes with the text that will be the centerpiece of your design can transform it from something any web designer could slap on a page to an element that supports the rest of the design.

Website copy is the text
that appears on the pages of a website. It can be used to explain, inform, persuade, or entertain - and an experienced web copywriter will use it to do all of these things at some point. What you'll be using it for depends on your situation.

Web copy is the facilitator, not the end product. As a result, great web copy isn't beautifully written, detailed and complex, or breathtakingly unique. Instead, it's useful, functional and concise. It's a means to an end.

When we read material on the web, there is really no such thing as forward, content on the web is hooked together by links. The Web can jump from page to page, we can't guarantee that our readers will read information in any particular sequence. That is why writing great copy is so important.