If you’re still using table-based layouts for your websites, it’s time to learn how to design using CSS. There’s a brand new (and very affordable) software tutorial called CSS Designer Starter Kit that teaches you step-by-step how to take your Firework or Photoshop design comp to a full-featured CSS website design in Dreamweaver.

Learn the basics of CSS web design like creating multple column layouts, CSS navigation and using the CSS float property to control your layout structure and images. Use foreground and background images in various repeating patterns to reduce the size of your website code.

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Tags: css designer starter kit, css web design, css websites, learn css

Trellian is our new free Dreamweaver template and it comes with sweet CSS navigation courtesy of CSS Menu Writer.  We wanted to showcase a few of our favorite Dreamweaver extensions, so we also generated the XHTML  page structure in CSS Sculptor.  The template is tableless and includes a multi-level CSS menu that can be easily customized in the code.

If you do your own website design, we highly recommend both CSS Sculptor and CSS Menu Writer.  It’s truly amazing how quickly you can generate standards compliant site structure and navigation.  What used to take the most time in developing a new site has been reduced to a matter of minutes so we can focus more on the eye candy and content.

You can preview the Trellian template or download it from our Dreamweaver templates page.

Tags: css menu writer, css sculptor, Dreamweaver Extensions, Dreamweaver Templates, webassist

We’ve posted a collection of pure CSS website layouts for download that we created with the CSS Sculptor Dreamweaver extension in order to showcase it’s speed and flexibility. We created over 25 layouts that all validate as XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.1 in less than 30 minutes!

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Tags: css 2.0, css layouts, css scupltor, design, dreamweaver, extensions, templates, xhtml 1.0

We’ve been hearing a lot about CSS Menu Writer over the last couple of months and it’s finally here. Just released by WebAssist, CSS Menu Writer takes the hassle out of creating CSS menu navigation in Dreamweaver.

Menu Writer is a Dreamweaver extension that creates horizontal or vertical website menus through a tabbed wizard interface, similar to CSS Sculptor. As with Sculptor, Eric Meyer had a hand in making sure Menu Writer menus are standards compliant and valid CSS and HTML. The extension installs just like any other in Dreamweaver, and is accessible through the WebAssist toolbar.

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Tags: css menu writer, css menus, dreamweaver, navigation, webassist

I doubt there’s many designers out there who haven’t implemented CSS to some extent in their designs, but harnessing the true power of CSS takes time and effort to learn. I come across CSS tutorials and tips sites all the time, and thought it would be worth the time to compile a list of other sites into a single post.  It’s primarily for my own reference, but if anyone else finds it useful, even better.

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