Great Resources Elsewhere: March 29 to April 04

The 960 Grid System is an all-in-one package for the rapid development of websites that are 960 pixels wide. As the site says, 960px is a great with to start with for two reasons: “All modern monitors support at least 1024 × 768 pixel resolution,” and “960 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, 16, 20, 24, 30, 32, 40, 48, 60, 64, 80, 96, 120, 160, 192, 240, 320 and 480. This makes it a highly flexible base number to work with.” The system comes with printable grid paper (for sketching) as well as templates for Photoshop and other programs (for designing) and a CSS framwork (for coding). If you’re in to frameworks, this is probably worth a look.

Dejan Cancarevic has compiled a list of the 12 most commonly used tips and techniques. And while I have no way of verifying the veracity of that claim, I’d say they’re pretty common techniques regardless. It’s a great roundup overall — my only complaint is that Dejan has used quite a few deprecated tags in his examples, such as bold tags instead of strong tags, and he doesn’t close all of his tags (e.g., his breaks). In short, his CSS is great, but his XHTML leaves a bit to be desired.

Trevor Davis has compiled a list of the “6 Most Important CSS Techniques You Need To Know.” This list is fundamentally different from the one StylizedWeb published this week, in that Trevor’s techniques focus more on the basics (such as replacing text with an image) instead of SW’s more intermediate- to advanced-level article. Though basic, there is a lot of useful information in this article. Trevor’s tips on setting a consistent base font size, for example, would be pretty invaluable to a new CSS developer wanting to learn to do things the right way.

I’ve already mentioned this article once in passing this week, but I wanted to ensure it got the attention it deserved. Woork’s Antonio Lupetti has compiled a great resource for anyone who might be interested in styling some seriously attractive message boxes. Antonio offers five different message box styles, all of which can be created with one or two lines of XHTML, a few lines of CSS, and minimal images (if any!). This collection is definitely worth a look, and probably a bookmark (I know I’ve bookmarked it!).