Review: CSS Zen Garden
(www.csszengarden.com)
Cascading style sheets (CSS) is a well-known way to mark up
your web pages. Zen Garden is one of the most popular websites
about CSS. It’s a great source for creative CSS minds; they
can use their inspiration to participate in a kind of
competition to make the most beautiful and attractive website
with their CSS skills. The main idea is to give the standard
CSS Zen Garden homepage a refreshing new look. All official
submissions will be posted on the homepage so visitors can
select in which design they want to read the website.
For designers and web developers CSS Zen Garden offers a lot information and
inspiration. They can follow up the latest trends in CSS styling and use them in
websites of their own. The CSS code used in the submissions is from a reasonable
high level, which means the content may be too advanced for beginning web
developers. Never the less is CSS Zen Garden the ultimate resource for everyone
who likes to keep his CSS skills up to date. Visitors can analyse other CSS design to
learn from, or they can use al their creativity to make a design their selves.
Usability
The build-up of the CSS Zen Garden website isn’t that great, to be honest. The first
time we visited the website it was pretty hard to find out what it was about. After
browsing through the website for two minutes, we understood the concept and didn’t
had too many difficulties to take a look at the different submissions. The latest
submitted designs can easily be accessed though the right column where there’s
also a link to the archives. In theses archives you can take a look at all 979 – the
number of submissions when we were visiting the website – designs with just a
simple click.
Design
CSS Zen Garden was a pretty hard example to give a quotation to, because the
website design because it’s changing al the time. It’s also a fact that the creators of
the concept can’t control it, because the visitors are the real creators of the CSS Zen
Garden layout. The only thing they can do is make sure the best designs will be
submitted on the homepage, the other ones will end up in the recycle bin.
Pleasurable
The concept of CSS Zen Garden is very interesting, because of the competition
between web designers all over the world. For the spectators – the normal visitors of
the website – it is very nice to look at and to learn from. All kinds of ads and
commercial messages are banned from CSS Zen Garden, so you’ll never get
interrupted.
After visiting CSS Zen Garden we can say it’s one of the best sites for web
designers. The competition concept is interesting for as well professional designers
and beginners. So if you’re interested in cascading style sheets, CSS Zen Garden is
the place to be!
Frederic Cox and Nick Looijmans