For my upcoming ALA article (man, saying that feels good, even if it doesn’t get published), I would like to be able to draw on the feelings of major designers. To this end I’m thinking about sending a simple questionnaire to the web teams responsible for a number of high profile sites.

I’m not sure what the questions will be, but here’s some rough ideas:

1. Why do you use appropriate layout system to layout xyz.com?
2. if the page is tables Why don’t you use CSS for layout? CSS is very powerful. Is it because you don’t know about CSS, don’t know how to recreate your layout in CSS or some other reason? else if the page is CSS Why don’t you use tables? They’re tried and trusted
3. Why is design important for your site? may get the answer “because everybody else has it” which would be fruitless
4. If you could change one thing about HTML+CSS to make it a little easier to do your job, what would that be?
5. Do the designers at your location design pages bottom-up by writing code or top-down, using tools such as Illustrator, Freehand, Photoshop or the Gimp?

The other thing to think about is mentioning my ideas. If I say I want to put the grids back into web design, will that influence the answers? Probably. Do I want this? Not sure, I wouldn’t mind feedback on my ideas from the people running the top sites on the net.