I’m all for working smarter and not reinventing the wheel. Whether it’s a logo, a design, a website…. very rarely will i do anything completely from scratch. It’s just a waste of time.
Need some sort of effect / style? It’s already out there. There’s a 99% chance you’ve seen it somewhere or your subconscious has seen it… so it’s a just a case of finding it. It’s the same when building a website – it’s pretty rare you’ll come up with an entirely unique feature or idea which has never been attempted ever before online.
That’s just the nature of the beast. Billions of pages, applications, database structures, api’s, frameworks, languages… no matter how radical your idea is, it probably already exists in some shape or form only you don’t realize it.
Anyway, nudging myself back on topic, css frameworks are a great way to speed up building a template. No cross browser problems, no layout nightmares, no forgetting anything… it’s all done for you. Bricks, paint, cement, plaster, wood, tiles etc… it’s all there along with a green field site and foundations – it’s simply a case of coming up with a design and then using those resources to turn your design in to a working model.
That’s what a css framework does, as the name might suggest. I’m experimenting with a few different css frameworks for my college project.
- http://www.blueprintcss.org/
- http://960.gs/
- http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/
- http://elasticss.com/
- http://code.google.com/p/emastic/
- http://bluetrip.org/
They all have their own perks and i’m not quite in a position yet to name a favorite or recommend one in particular but why not download them all and check them out for yourself 😉