RE: I need more bling!

Rails
#1

I really should check my links… I meant:
http://openwebdesign.org/
and
http://www.oswd.org/

Just by using a little CSS magic you can turn any boring site into a
beaut’. (Now tell me you didn’t design using tables…)

Brian C.

#2

I’ve got Zeldman’s book “Designing with Web Standards”, where he talks
all about not using tables except for tabular data. I did that up
front. It’s a good book, but he’s very much talking to
Web-designers-cum-graphic-artists rather than plonkers like me.

Problem is that most of my content is tabular data; on almost all
pages, I’ve got a banner across the top, menu down the left side, a
description of what the content is, plus a whole lot of what’s
obviously data out of tables in the middle. Where there’s actions the
user can do on a row of data (which is the norm), I’ve added clickable
links at the right hand end of the row. I’ve used

instead of for everything but the tabular data, just like Zeldman recommends. The layout itself I'm pretty happy with; it just doesn't excite.

I had a look at www.csszengarden.com, and flicked through the book of
the site the other day. Their stuff looks fantastic, but my problem
is their content is paragraphs and headings, not tables of data. I’ve
decided that it’s much easier to show paragraphs and headings (look at
all the nice blog sites out there) than rows and columns, but that
doesn’t mean that rows and columns needs to look like crap!

Oh well - my graphic artist friend is off now mocking up some pages
for me in Dreamweaver. She thinks it doesn’t look that bad as it
currently stands; I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing.

Regards

Dave M.

#3

With a bit of shading and borders (top and bottom border slightly
lighter/darker creates a feeling of depth), you can create pretty rows,
for example http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum, all tabular data.