I just replied to a comment about one of the sites we reviewed a week or two ago, while I was starting to write this review. The other site was beautiful, with every whiz-bang feature you could think of, but very laggy. Then I looked at Andy Cracicle’s (@webcanvasdesign) site and thought, you don’t have to be flashy to have a solid site. I like the simple icon nav on the left side and the subtlety of the whiz-bangs that he does use.
On the business side, I also like his philosophy that “Not only do I design beautiful user-interfaces for all devices from mobile right up to desktops but I code them as well using HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery and PHP while making sure I SEO optimise websites not only using the latest proven coding web standard techniques but also for pagespeed to keep search engines happy”… I still think that last part is something that designers miss out on – but that’s for another blog.