But I say 'almost' because still the designer should consider the other issues - especially the conceptual foundations. HTML became so incredibly popular because it empowers us to communicate in ways previously only dreamt of. There is however a price to pay, in that you can't be absolutely sure how a page will appear to everyone, since there are variations e.g. in how colors and layouts might be rendered. We occasionally get complaints or suggestions about such things as illegible color combinations which appear perfectly legible to me, but if it seems reasonable, we try to accomodate such comments. I've been through many, many iterations with The WDVL 's home page, and each time I was sure that this was it, I'd found our perfect style.
Many sites have pages that are unduly hard to read.
Don't assume that if you can read it, so can everyone. But if a page has many links then it's critical to give them some context for the extra semantics that will help people choose the best path to follow. The table on our home page is supposed to reflect that. I think of myself as more of a librarian than a graphic designer. What this boils down to is, choose your directory structure very carefully, and be prepared to change it as your site grows.