CWC Web Dev

Design of a site can be one of the trickiest things to get right. How easy a site is to read, understand and its technical usability are one of the more critical elements to a sites success with a user. If they can find the info they want quickly and easily they will be a happy customer and are much more likely to return to the site. When we started out this was one of the trickiest bits and we would spend a long time doing mock ups of different designs. These designs started in HTML and as technology grew and people wanted a design language that they can reuse and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) emerged. Now we still do a lot of mock ups and design, but now it goes into CSS files and we can reuse it easily.

Why do you care, if we can reuse our designs easily, so can other people, and that means people start trading in designs and even giving away free ones. So you can easily pick up free designs from round the web and use them saving you a lot of time. Here's a few which offer free designs:

• http://www.free-css-templates.com/
• http://www.freecsstemplates.org/
• http://www.csstemplates.net/free-css-templates.php
• http://www.free-css-templates.com/
• http://www.oswd.org/
• http://www.opensourcetemplates.org/
  
• http://www.themesbase.com/
• http://themes.wordpress.net/
  
• http://www.osskins.com/main/
• 
  

They normally come with one page of HTML so you can see how to use them but in case they don't - You normally get a file with a .css suffix. Save that file in the same directory as your html files and in your head section add

<link href="/filename.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

and you should be fine to use the styles within it.




Enjoy.