CSS Zen Garden
CSS is not used to put any content on your site, it’s simply used to take the content you have and create an attractive layout and appearance .
With CSS you can create good-looking websites with nice effects. With CSS you can control the text (like font, color, size, etc.), and the layout (like backgrounds, margin, padding, etc.) of a website, in one single file! — CSS Tutorial
Click the image to see some lovely CSS stylesheets.
Below are links to three free CSS menu generators that I know of that others may wish to try.
CSSMenuMaker provides the average webmaster with tools to create custom, cross browser compatible website menus. The menu generator makes it easy to create custom CSS menus without having to know all the complicated HTML and CSS. If you are a more experienced web developer they provide the sources code for all our CSS menus so that you can download, tweak, and integrate as much as you want. Use the CSS menu generator an unlimited amount of times.
CSS Menu Builder provides 30+ horizontal menus, 700+ vertical menu combinations, and breadcrumb menus that consist of more than 200+ combinations. In total the site offers more than 1000 menu combinations not including the endless color combinations.
IzzyMenu – it’s easy to use Menu Builder, which allows you to build your CSS & DHTML menu in minutes. Choose from dozens ready styles or create your own menu style. They are low in filesize, so they won’t consume a lot of bandwidth from your hosting.
Aside from menu generators there are other CSS tools that are free and recommended by many.
Free CSS Toolbox – CSS Validator, CSS Formatter, CSS Compressor.
Web Album Maker is a gallery software which makes web albums of digital images. With clicks, Web Album Maker creates HTML photo albums, JPEG thumbnails, and CSS for your online photo albums. It can create thumbnails of your photos and display them in index pages in HTML. It can also produce slide shows of your photos for easy navigation. This photo web album generator creates online photo slideshow in minutes – and it’s free! When you are finished, you can upload your photo album to your web site. The appearance of the generated photo albums can be fully configured through the use of skins or scripts. No need for extra software in order to view albums, just your web browser.
SnipEditor – Html & CSS Editor is a simple free editor for editing & instantly previewing html code, but can handle larger projects too – all in one window! It comes with over 30 examples including mouseovers, text effects, link effects, css examples, graphics, color charts & guides plus much more.
Where to go to learn CSS
Beginners
http://www.htmldog.com/guides/cssbeginner/
http://www.cssbasics.com/
http://www.w3schools.com/css/
Intermediate
http://www.westciv.com/style_master/academy/css_tutorial/
Advanced
http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/
CSS on del.icio.us - Ever-changing links to resources and examples.
CSS on MaxDesign – Tutorials and code generation tools.
CSSBeauty - Gallery site, news, job listings, forums and more. Your one-stop shop for all things CSS.
Position is Everything - The place to go for Internet Explorer bug fixes.
Web Developer’s Handbook - A really big listing of CSS and general web design-related links. http://www.alvit.de/handbook/
Holy CSS, Zeldman! Another really big listing of CSS and general web design-related links.
WordPress
Hello…this is so great for me. I am a self learned right from my own website to now a wordpress.com blog which is giving me much frustration as they have their own game book. I was spoiled with blogger as they tend to be a lot more people friendly.
Finding info on CSS is not the problem…it is understanding the info which in some cases is way to technical for a self learner.
I use CSS on my Squidoo pages but have not tried in on my blog. Thanks
A few other things to keep in mind when designing your website is to try and use as few images, css, and script as possible. The reasoning behind this is that even if you have a bunch of small scripts and images, the server can become overwhelmed with the sheer amount of get-requests and make your site slow. Additionally, WordPress plug-ins can add to this problem without your direct knowledge, since you do not know what it is adding to your sites code until you take a look.
There are many plugins that I wish were more bandwidth and load friendly, but they just don’t cut it.
I use sectional css for my site to reduce the amount of css that must be loaded per page. For example, I have page.css and main.css and a few others that I then use php to check the wordpress functions is_page() and a few others which then tells it to load that css file.
There are also CSS Uncompressors for the times when you need to be able to work with the CSS file you removed all the formatting and spacing from.
Great article and Cheers!
Eric
thank for sharing, I have tried to download SnipEditor – Html & CSS Editor
but unfortunately the website has been banned, regard
Great post. Lots of resource for me to work on. Thanks for sharing. I will try to make my own template for my blog.