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Social networks are getting more and more popular. People use them to connect with friends and colleagues, stay up-to-date on things that interest them, you can even use them to assist in your job search. But there are so many different ones out there. I have a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account focused primarily on this site. But are there other social media sites that you use?

How did you become a web designer? Fill out this form (be sure to include a photo) to be featured on the home page of About.com Web Design/HTML: Share Your Experience.

More Web design resources and help: Follow me on Twitter or Become a Fan on Facebook

Back in April, Google announced that they were adding a new signal to their ranking algorithm – speed. I have been told recently that web page sizes are no longer as important because many people have high speed internet connections. Google has found in their tests that the slower a site loads, the less time people stay on that site. So, even if all your customers have DSL or better connections, they still will benefit from a fast site. And you will benefit from happier customers. One way to speed up your site is by having the web server compress the files before delivering them. This can reduce load times significantly.

How to Speed Up Your Web Pages

• How to Compress Websites with Gzip Compression
• Speeding Up Your Web Page
• White Space in HTML Can Slow Your Pages
• Remove Comments from HTML to Speed Download Time

The trailing slash on URLs is often left off, but that is a mistake as it can affect how quickly your pages load from the web server. That slash may not seem important, but it serves a purpose.

More Help Naming Your Pages and Creating URLs

• Why do URLs often end with a slash?
• What Should I Name my HTML File?
• What is the index.html page?
• What's My URL? - Learn to Find your URL

In previous years, when I've asked this in the past I've gotten a lot of responses from people who write HTML from scratch insisting that knowing HTML and CSS is critical to doing the job. But as spreng says in a comment last week, word processors used to require that you know codes to get them to print and now they are all WYSIWYG. I've heard from beginners, hiring managers, and others, what do you think?

If you're looking for inspiration for your next design project, I would suggest looking at the images displayed on deviantART. This site hosts all types of art from photography to anime, but the part that I find most inspiring is the web interface design section. I love browsing through these when I'm bored or looking for my next idea for a project. Many of the designs are quite beautiful.

• Inspiration: deviantART Web Interface Designs
• Where Do You Go For Inspiration or a Fresh Perspective?
• Solving Designer's Block - 6 Ways to Get Unblocked
• Poll: What is your first source for design ideas?
• See all the Software Picks
• Suggest Software for the Pick of the Week

XML can be a very easy language to learn, but if you don’t follow some specific rules, it won’t work for you. Make sure you know these five common XML errors when you’re writing XML (or XHTML) and you’ll find your documents will be more correct.

More XML Articles You May Have Missed

• Five Common XML Errors
• What is the Difference Between XLink and XPointer?
• What is DocBook?
• Write Simple XLink in XML

If you have been unsure about whether to move to HTML 5 video or not, one more hurdle has been removed. MPEG LA has announced that the license for H.264 video will be free forever for anyone who provides their videos free to the end user.

Since this was the main objection groups like Mozilla had against using this codec, chances are that Firefox will soon be updated to use it. Then you'll only need to save your videos in two formats: H.264 and Flash (for IE). And when IE 9 comes out, you will only need the one format.

Choosing a layout method is often very personal. One person might prefer absolute positioning while another only uses floats with relative sized blocks. An elastic layout is often considered the most flexible, because it sets a specific size for major text blocks while leaving the rest of the layout to stretch to fit the available space. But fixed width layouts give the designer more control over how the page will look. And others prefer a completely liquid layout because the page stays consistent no matter how big or small the browser is. And of course, some people still prefer tables for layout despite the many reasons to use CSS instead. What layout style is your preference?

I received a submission today from a web designer who is, in his words "sick of code". He would like the web programmers and web developers out there to know a little secret "the future of web design is design" and that coders should stick to writing code that he can slide into his designs "without knowing all about tags or code". My interpretation from this rant is that Polomo does not want to have to learn HTML or CSS. He's a designer, and knowing those things just hinders his creative process.

What do you think? Does learning the back end of web design (HTML and CSS) hinder a designer's creative process? Or does it help? Do you find developers as annoying as Polomo does? And what about the developers out there? Do you agree? Should you be focused only on the code and making sure it slides into a designer's vision with no hiccups? Or do you find web designers just as annoying?

Thanks, Polomo, for taking the time to post your feelings. It should make for interesting debate.