Ordered Zen
I am proud to announce my entry in to the CSS Zen Garden has been accepted. Ordered Zen was actually completed a few months ago, but was just added to ‘The Garden’ yesterday. Why does this make me so happy? Well, besides the obvious honor of being placed in such a useful and admired collection, allow me to give you a little background.
Pretty close to a year ago, I was a table maniac. I drew the line at using CSS for fonts, and the occasional border. Sure, I’d glanced over Zeldman’s DWWS. I’d heard talk about semantics and CSS layout techniques. But I held firm to my beliefs (which were true at one time, many years ago) that Netscape and older browsers just couldn’t handle the advanced layout of CSS. And because of this view, I was pretty ignorant of just how powerful CSS could be for layouts. I was still focused on the presentation of a site, so whatever I had to do to get the content to look the way I wanted it to, that’s what I did.
But then, I stumbled upon the CSS Zen Garden. Within minutes, my web design world was turned upside-down. I’d read the books, I’d heard the talk, but until I really saw it in action, I wasn’t convinced. But after seeing the breadth of design, and the effectiveness of semantic XHTML, I was hooked.
And painfully hooked. I knew nothing about how to get any of this done. It’s like your grandpa trying to send an email. It’s a totally different thought process than you’re used to. So over the next few months I was trying my best to create my own CSS/XHTML layouts, but it was very frustrating. So many little bugs, so many hacks, exceptions, and rules. But every return to The Garden, I’d regain my hope. “I know it’s possible, I’m looking at it right in front of me.”
So now I have finally contributed back to the tool that got me started in the first place. It’s quite an honor. So thanks Dave, and keep up the good work.
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Published October 22, 2004 by:
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So far there are 15 comments.
A very very nice design – congratulations Steve!
October 22nd, 2004
Definately one of my fav’s!
Nice work!
October 22nd, 2004
i love it. it looks great!
October 22nd, 2004
Yeah, that looks niiiiiiiiiiiice. Love those muted colors.
October 22nd, 2004
Awesome!!! your submission is such a great design. Congratulations for making it to one of the world’s primier CSS design showcase.
October 23rd, 2004
Congratulations on a beautiful, clean design. And thank you for such an inspiring and helpful website of your own.
October 23rd, 2004
Congrats Steve on a very nice job well done. Must be extremely rewarding to be able to contribute back to such a great site. Keep up the good work!
October 23rd, 2004
Love this design, have to give it to you, it’s by far one of the best designs I’ve seen on CSSZenGarden.
Cheers
October 24th, 2004
Clean , crispy , very clear…
… and very contemporary.
Respect.
October 25th, 2004
Hey there. You must have got some kind of exposure because this is how I found this site (at the garden).
Good stuff.
I love lists :)
take care,
Dustin
October 26th, 2004
Congrats on a great Zen submission, one day I too will get one up there! Love the site by the way…
October 27th, 2004
I really like your design!
BTW : I stumbled on your design via http://csszengarden.coret.org/
Dana
October 27th, 2004
I guess the people above or below me had poured you with so many nice words i dont feel the need to do the same. It’s really great.
Still trying to get it to work with my Wordpress template, there’s a few bugs, but i should be able to fix it. But you will still be around right? lol.
October 28th, 2004
Really nice. It seemed that yours was the nicest of all the top level examples. I really liked the implied table border with the white gaps.
One question remained. (newbie to CSS – beware). Why does yours click drag down on main body text work, when most of the other CSS examples don’t? Also why is the div id intro not selectable at all. Text selection is key in my list of features in a nice layout.
October 29th, 2004
By far my favourite site. It has a beauty and simplicty and manages to convey a feel of organisation. This is my inspiration to migrate to CSS based design.
November 16th, 2004