The importance of clean and Elegant Web Design

When designing my online portfolio, I became acutely aware of the importance of clean, and elegant web design.  Thanks to sticking with mostly standards based web design, using CSS, my web page displays elegantly not just on laptops with 14 inch monitors, but also on the difficult to design for Safari Mobile Web browser.  This means my site looks the same on an iphone/ipod touch, as it does in an Internet Explorer, and Mozilla Firefox web browser.   All of the items do not work, particularly the flash based movies, but that's OK.  So long as the site structure itself works, a potential employer can access my resume, and get a general idea of what I am capable of doing, that is good enough for me.  I can truly see the elegance and beauty of complying to standards, be they web based standards, such as CSS, Instructional Design Standards such as ADDIE, or Distance Learning Standards such as Quality Matters.  The standards are there to ensure that the product works reasonably well given a range of normal circumstances.  Thank you CSS!