What is CSS? Cascading Style Sheets are the files that make a website look the way it does. Your HTML holds the background structure and content and the CSS styles your site. CSS’s are the best practice way of designing websites that makes them easy to alter in appearance without breaking the fundamentals of the site. It’s a bit like being able to move your furniture around and paint the walls to change the look of your house without having to rebuild anything.
CSS Zen Garden is a great site that allows designers to strut their stuff using only CSS. This was great fun to design as an assessment for my degree. The challenge of changing the CSS only was a great experience and shows how powerful this type of website structure really is. I created a fixed footer that stays in place as the content scrolls up the page. It’s like the passers by are watching a giant retro news screen. And I love, love the retro fonts. Did I mention how this was so much fun?
You can see the finished product here. Note that the sidebar links point to my own website, where the page is hosted, not the CSS Zen Garden website. To check out loads of other great designs that use the exactly the same HTML and content, with only the CSS files changing visit CSS Zen Garden.
