Question

Hi all CSS experts,
I come from the server side and must say I’m really impressed with all the new css galleries and designs. I picked up a CSS book but I still wonder how you do your design: do you use a whiteboard/white paper and then translate into css and tweak it? do you have wysiwyg editors that let you draw a webpage and then convert it to css?…
Thanks a lot for your input

Answer 1

I usually start designing my page to be used without CSS. I outline the titles using Hx tags, the paragraphs, links, lists and images.

Then I hand-draw a mockup splitting my page in big blocks and using divs, positioning and floats I create the structure of the layout.

Then I concentrate on each of these big blocks, decomposing them in smaller blocks until I have positioned everything where it should be.

Then I refine the basic elements (lists, links, text) trying to find out common styles to reduce as much as I can the number of selectors.

Finally I open all the available web browsers to test the differences and apply hacks/conditional stylesheets.

I NEVER had good experencies using visual editors, but I have to admit that I quit using them many years ago.