After a lengthy weekend away I’m back at it in Edmonton, albeit temporarily. As some of you know I’m currently in the process of packing up my stuff and moving north to Grande Prairie. Thankfully summer has finally arrived and the days have started to get a lot longer which is something I need as I’m quickly running out of time to finish all the home repair and cleaning that needs to be done…not to mention a few other web projects that have to be finished.
With not enough time in the day I’m always looking for ways to speed up web development and thanks to the great people at NETTUTS+ it seems I’ve managed to cut the meat and potatoes of web development in half thanks to some of there tips (which leaves more time for golfing and hockey, YAY!). I just recently was introduced to Texter, which is a superb little program that seems to make you slightly even lazier (but more efficient) with work on your computer.
While Texter has been a huge help nothing prepared me for the amount of time saved thanks to a CSS framework called 960. As most web designers know coding CSS isn’t overly complicating but it can be time consuming. I know I’m not alone but I often found myself going back on previous projects and copying and pasting snippets of code to try and speed up development on a current project thinking it would save me a great deal of time. Since using the 960 system though I’ve found that while I may have been saving some time I wasn’t working efficiently with the time I saved as the copying and pasting often led to trouble shooting with floats and of course the ever so annoying alternative Internet Explorer CSS file.
It wasn’t shortly after that I was introduced to 960. I was always aware of CSS frameworks but never really made good use of them because I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it and always felt that having 100% your code was the proper way to do things. Low and behold I hear now that more and more designers are switching to frameworks because developing with it is lightning quick and you often have less troubleshooting to do with other browsers (*cough cough* Internet Explorer).
The editor at NETTUTS+ is Jeff Way and was one of the many who at first didn’t think CSS frameworks were a good idea, that was until he tried 960. His tune quickly changed and he soon realized that the pro’s definitely out weight the cons, in fact he has produced an interesting screen cast to the subject as well as providing some demonstrations on how and why the 960 framework should be at the very least looked at if you’re a web developer. You can view the screencast here.
Frameworks aren’t for everyone and I still find myself hand coding a project simply for the fact that it just isn’t flexible enough to meet your design requirements. Case in point the name 960, if you’re looking to expand or contract your website you wont be able to with this framework. It’s called 960 for a reason and you have no choice but to design your website to a 960 pixel width. A definite drawback but not something I would say that should stop anyone from using it as most websites these days are based around that width to begin with.
While there are always cons the pros just outweigh them heavily in this case. The most obvious is the time you save but other things such as the small lack of browser inconsistences and having a clean system not only speeds up development time but you also find yourself not having to do as much layout troubleshooting.
If you’re a web developer who has yet to try out the 960 framework I strongly urge you to download it and read the documentation or at the very least watch Jeffery Way’s screen cast regarding this exact subject, if I haven’t changed your mind I have no doubt he will.
As always though if you’re a first timer CSS developer I highly recommend you to stay away and learn the language from scratch. There is something to be said for knowing the ins and outs of CSS and it will make any problems you have in the future with a CSS framework that much easier to solve and understand.
Thank you so much for posting this. This gives me some ideas on how to create my own CSS-website.