Top 10 CSS Sites

There are hundreds of sites that offer tutorials, examples and inspiration about CSS. In no particular order, here’s a list of my favorites that I visit on a regular basis.

1. 456 Berea Street

Roger Johansson’s site is a consistently valuable source of tutorials and examples (here’s one) about using CSS properly (among other topics). Few sites explain the intricacies of the CSS spec as well as he does.

2. Screenspire

As others have mentioned, there are now plenty of CSS showcase sites on the web. Some have earned their place while many are just shameless ripoffs.

However, Screenspire earns its place as my destination of choice when I’m in need of some inspiration for its novel approach of showing a complete picture of the site being showcased. I find it very handy to be able to flick through screenshots of a whole site.

Honorable mention: Stylegala.

3. W3Schools

Perhaps this is my guilty secret, but when ever I need to check on a CSS attribute, I find myself heading back to the W3Schools site. I just find it so easy to use and I like its no frills approach to presenting information.

Plus, if you’re a CSS newbie, you can try out and edit examples right there on the site.

4. A List Apart

Some of the articles are a little too bleeding edge to be employed commercially (usually because of their lack of support for a certain browser).

That being said, the quality of the articles is consistently high and I have learned a ton from this site.

5. web graphics

Another source of regular good articles on CSS, like this one on writing maintainable CSS. Some of the articles are pretty technical though, so if you’re new to the field of CSS, be aware of this.

6. Max Design

Russ Weakley’s articles and tutorials on CSS are clearly written and easy to follow (such as this one on building a web page template in CSS). His examples and tutorials on lists and floats are also essential reading.

7. Position Is Everything

If you’ve ever wanted to understand exactly why a browser (well, okay IE) exhibits a particular CSS bug and know how to get around it, this is the place to go.

Holly and John also have a collection of great articles on CSS and a number of CSS layout demos, such as the wonderfully titled Jello Mold Piefecta Layout.

8. css-discuss

As well as being primarily a mailing list with far too many posts each day for one to keep up and manage a day job (although some people obviously do), the web site has a huge collection of CSS resources for you to get lost in.

9. Web Developer’s Handbook

This is not a site that I visit regularly, but if you ever needed a vast compendium of CSS (and other web design) resources, well, here it is.

10=. mezzoblue

Although Dave Shea hasn’t been writing as much about CSS recently as he used to, when he does, it’s worth reading. For the uninitiated, there’s a large CSS archive to work through until the next post.

10=. Stopdesign

Like Dave Shea, Doug Bowman is not as prolific a writer as I would like. However, his articles on CSS are always insightful and extremely educational (and usually pretty cutting edge).

He, too, has a large collection of archived posts on CSS to peruse until the next one comes out.

12. Google

So, I can’t count. As I was thinking about the CSS sites that I visited regularly, I realized that I find most of my information via Google.

To be honest, if I want to get a CSS question answered, Google is my first port of call 9 times out of 10. So, in so far as Google can be considered a ‘site’, I thought I should include it on my list.