It's been a while since I've designed websites as a freelancer now that I'm working at The Old State because my position involves the business side of running a web firm. And I love it, I love my job and I love working with our clients. But when I am busy running to meetings, managing projects and QAing all the sites our team has built, I often overlook the amazing workmanship behind it all. And one of the most important elements to a great site, which I always forget to appreciate, is CSS.

 

Cascading Style Sheets...what the heck are Cascading Style Sheets? Simply put, it is a markup language defining the structure of the site and the possibilities are endless. For instance, you can define the font, the colors, the background, the columns, the positioning of objects and so much more. What's great about CSS is you can use a single sheet to define hundreds and thousands of pages and change the entire look and structure of the site by going back and redefining that one sheet. I am no expert, believe me, but the mark of a great website built with CSS is how the site looks when the aesthetics are stripped away.

 

Why is it so important to use CSS? For starters, it's HTML friendly, which is music to our ears. And with that being said, it's also compatible with all browsers, meaning the rare 2% of consumers who use let's say Opera can see the site without it being broken (of course there can be slight variances here and there). CSS is also SEO friendly, loads faster and above all, super customizable while maintaining consistency.

One of my favorite sites that celebrates CSS is CSS Zen Garden. It invites designers and developers to take the current site, download the HTML and CSS and redesign the whole site without touching the HTML codes, only manipulating CSS. It's quite challenging, but the site exhibits just how wonderful CSS can be. Here's the original site and below are a few of my favorite entries. They all look different, but the content and the HTML codes are identical. Marvelous, isn't it?