Yep, he is right. There are many superb developers who do not use Photoshop. You cannot pump out a website through an image editor. If there ever comes a time that do feel you need an one, it does not have to be specifically psd. Your content has to be light when you do use that method. Why? All the bytes add up to how long it takes your webpage to load. Many people have broadband these days. Not everyone. If you are planning to build a media rich site in the future, optimize it for those with slow broadband. When it is meant for a wider audience, then you need to make sure individuals with a dial-up connection can still access your site. That does not really matter for you to know just yet however. There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to web development as you will soon find out. For now focus on the basics. Start with HTML. After that you should begin using CSS. Javascript is not required, but is recommended. Use an editor like Notepad++ with syntax highlighting.
YES, he said DIAL UP!!!
You know how many places in America there are where speeds faster than 33.6K dialup are a dream? Sure, I can get 22mbps broadband where I am in east BF New Hamsphire (though the 768kbps upstream that goes with it sucks), if I moved just forty miles north the question becomes “Broadband, what’s that?” – Northern New Hampshire, Western Main, entire swaths of the Dakotas… sure they’re sparsely populated, but not THAT sparsely populated…
But also think about phone plans – people on metered connection (Say hi to our friends in Australia and Canada) where after a certain amount of bandwidth the pipe gets choked and it turns into pay as you go… All the people in places like North Africa who ONLY access the web via phones on pay as you go… Half the people I talk to via IM, including members of this site are stuck in at least one of those scenarios.
It’s why I still maintain a 70/16 to 140/24 limit on my templates. What that means is ideally a page template WITH content text but not counting content images or videos (but counting ‘presentational only embeds’) should ideally be around 70k in 16 separate files, and the maximum I would allow for an entire page template (HTML+CSS+IMAGES+SCRIPTS, again not counting content images/vids) is 140k. If you cannot bring the page in under those numbers, you’re probably wasting EVERYONE’s time, and making the page cost more to host, be harder to maintain, and on the whole writing a giant steaming pile of trash.
Of course, you’ll ALWAYS have the people who will chime in with “Oh people on dialup are only a small percentage of the population”, and “oh but people in areas with metered plans are only a small percentage” or “oh people accessing the internet on phones is only a small percentage”… “The Percenters”, same people who go “Oh our page doesn’t work in Opera? well that’s only 3% of Internet users” (yeah, 3% of 2.2 billion), “Oh our page doesn’t work with scripting off, who does that?” (the couple million or so people who’ve downloaded the noscript plugin for FF, use Opera’s inbuilt per-site blacklisting/whitelisting, the various copies of noscript released for other browsers?)
“The Percenters” are great because they’ll nickle-and-dime their sites justifying their wasteful bloated useless crap until there’s no “target audience” left – which of course is the other term people use to justify being lazy, stupid or ignorant – well, “That’s not our target audience” – RIGHT.
Part of why I keep linking to “Lame excuses for not being a web professional” because it’s right on the money in showing how much of this just boils down to the incompetent trying to cover their tracks or make excuses for their fat, bloated, impossible to maintain and requires two or three times as much hosting as it should nonsense.
As said in that article:
Using the statistics defense is letting your (bad) design and/or technology choices determine who your target audience is.
Repeat the mantra – more PRESENTATIONAL (border, background, hover effect) images than content BAD, more scripting than markup BAD, javascript frameworks BAD… etc, etc, etc…
Because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how pretty it is, how many animated effects it has or how much the graphics “grab you” – if it gets in the way of the site loading quickly, letting as many users get at the content as possible and presenting that content in an easy to use accessible manner – WHAT GOOD IS IT?!? Which is the problem with 90%+ (excuse the pulling a percent out of my tuchas) of the garbage “pretty pictures” slapped together by Photoshop jockeys who don’t know the first thing about designing for the Internet (which is to say almost all of them), and the developers who slice up those goofy pictures into garbage fixed width (or worse fixed height) layouts with more scripting than you can shake someone with Parkinsons at!
… and trust me, I can shake at a awful lot of things these days 
That was funny when I read that part. Consider what they do as glitter. It does not add anything of significance for the intended audience. You can create a pretty page without adding a lot of bloat. If you are selling a product, putting five pictures of the item is one thing. Adding six layers of craptastic borders and etcetera is what an idiot does when they are trying to sell something to their visitors. You are targeting an audience even when you are not selling products or services. People look at your site for a few seconds then move elsewhere. “That is why you need glitter?” Relevant lightweight glitter then. Not 2-10mb of useless pictures. Too long to load? They will be back on Google search finding somewhere else to be. I personally despise Javascript thanks in part to script kiddies regular misuse of it. The little *******s need to get off the damn computer more. That is enough doom and gloom for the day. lol 
I tend to disagree with skipping the static mock-up stage. Designers design – pure and simple. They need to be able to use tools they know to express their ideas so the technical people can bring them to life.
As for JS frameworks the fact of the matter is JavaScript sucks. For most medium to large sites one would need to create their own normalization functions anyway. Why not allow a library to take care of it for you. A library that is well known, maintained and tried. It just doesn’t make any sense not to.
I don’t think it does any good to bash designers for using the tools they know. Designers aren’t technical. It is up to the technical people guide them within the context of what they know to express their ideas within the limitations of technology. Not bash them for not learning HTML and CSS if they will not be responsible for the implementation.
He or she is someone who is starting out. Photoshop does not teach someone how to build a website. It is a graphics editing program. Again, the cart is being put before the horse. This individual wants to learn the very basics of web development whom already knows how to mess around with psd. Why are some sitepoint members telling him to create a mockup before he knows how to do any coding? I know people here might mean well by their suggestions, but that is not helping. This person should learn how to build a website in raw code first. There is nothing wrong with Javascript when it used correctly. Nobody said Javascript sucks. It can be overused as with images and anything else.
But that’s the catch – if they don’t know the limitations of the medium, what business do they have drawing pretty pictures to be turned into it… It’s like the PHP developers who don’t know any HTML when that’s what they’re SUPPOSED to be outputting. It makes them completely unqualified to do the job.
It’s like handing a engineer a pretty picture of a car with no wheels and telling the engineer “It’s pretty, make that happen”… or having some artist draw a over the top artsy pretty picture of a skyscraper, then wondering why 11 years after what it was supposed to replace came down, the FOUNDATION isn’t even complete – right New York? (while the Burj Khalifa took what, 4 years to erect?)
The lack of knowledge in regards to the target medium is why most every site crapped out by a Photoshop jockey is USELESS on the accessibility front – and as disabled as my crippy backside is, I’m nowhere NEAR needing the accessibility aids of the truly disabled so far as the Internet is concerned. It’s like they think they’re working with airbrushes for photorealism when the tools are a #32 red sable and watercolors on whitewashed brick; the difference between a Sorayama and a Monet.
We’ve let the art f… art f… art folks take over, (Trying not to piss off Wanda Sykes here) and they’re DESTROYING the Internet as a useful tool by preying on the ignorance of clients who don’t know any better.
What I meant by that is the varying implementations of similar things between browsers and limited tool set to select nodes. Most frameworks help to bridge that gap.
agreed – I was referring to the action of designing sites not building them.
I have worked with several designers which did not know front-end code to save their life but had a good grasp of the limitations and useability patterns. For that reason I don’t think it is necessary for a designer to learn the front-end technologies when only responsible for establishing the overall the look and feel.
In most cases I would rather not have them know any mark-up considering they than feel a need to do things themselves and provide an impression to people who do not know any better that something is near complete when it has to completely rebuilt anyway and integrated into a back-end system. All I ever need from designers is a static mock-up yet some who knew enough mark-up to be dangerous with DW have handed me a DW zip. When that happens I rarely open the zip and merely request screen shots.
Fully agreed when interest is in building sites. Though that is not to discredit the purpose of the static mock-up (wireframe). I tend to see it as two separate jobs – design and programming.
Like I stated above I would disagree that lacks of technical skills translates to lack of understanding limitations. I mean if that where true printers would be the only ones allowed to work in print. Though print like web is separated into equal but separate processes: design and production. For the reason both jobs are two very different skill sets. Your pretty much putting forth the same argument as printers who receive designs that are absolute production nightmares merely in a web context.
I do agree with this. When there is not a front-end developer involved to some capacity they feel the need to do things themselves and that always ends poorly. I have seen it a few times with my current position where the marketing staff doesn’t want to bother the engineering department with smaller projects and all around with “web design” freelancers.