Inspiring Sites

Web design is a key component of being a webmaster. Who's going to keep coming back to your site if it looks like everyone else's. I'm a big proponent of using canned templates from reputable places like Project Seven and modifying them to suit your own needs. That way you spend more time developing content, and less time worrying about cross-browser/cross-platform support. At the same time, however, if you never get into the nitty gritty of your own code, you'll never create an optomized site.

When you buy a canned template, usually you don't get something that is already optomized for speed, visual appeal, search engine visibility, accessibility, and all the other things you need to worry about.

So today, I went searching around for inspiring homepages. Something that could give me inspiration for modding up my sites. I found a few golden nuggets.

The first site I'm going to mention is one I've known about for a while, but I never have really taken full advantage of. It's called the Zen Garden. The site is relatively slim on content itself - basically it's one page repeated over and over again but with different designs - all using various CSS techniques. It's truly amazing to see all the unique concepts and layouts people have put together. It's a great place to gather information from.

The next site was sold recently, so we'll see if it improves or degrades over the next several months - Style Gala is a site all about web styling. It shows off unique designs and has articles and discussion as well. Some of the sites up there are pretty cool. I found two sites there that I will definitely be emulating in the near future - A List Apart - which is a great webmaster resource. I read two articles there today that really got the hamsters in my brain running around. The other is the Gr0w Collection - that's Grow with a zero. They are a web design studio with a great site and a cool slideshow generator that has inspired me to develop my own slideshow utility.

Another interesting site was pointed out to me by a fellow Digital Point member - Web Design and Usability Guidelines - is a site that is produced by our tax dollars. A lot of good information although I have yet to get through a reasonable chunk of it just yet.