I am co-developer/co-owner of InstantSpot.com a free site/blog network thing. We were thinking there might be some interest in a design contest. Our sites allow complete access to the stylesheet. So, as you CSS designers know, there is virtually no limit to what you could come up with. (Unfortunately we aren't very good at design). We are pretty much a no-budget operation, but we do enjoy a pretty high page rank (PR 6/7) and would love do a blog post about the winning designer/design and link back to his/her site. Anyways, please let me know your thoughts. If you are interested PM me and I will send you an invitation code so you can get started. Thanks!
Well, if you want CSS designers to take the concept seriously, you should clean up the MAJOR issues with your codebase first... The following is JUST the homepage: XML Prolog - welcome to IE being in quirks mode. Mismatched encoding - you are serving as UTF-8, but have a windows-1252 meta - /FAIL/ hard since that prevents one from even validating the code. Fat bloated jquery nonsense that isn't even USED ON MOST OF THE PAGES. Inlined CSS, Inlined Presentation, and best of all, MULTIPLE IE conditionals - for a design that frankly shouldn't need ANY of that. divitus and classitus - more unneccessary DIV's and classes than you can shake a stick at... Lack of semantic markup - your lists aren't lists, there's no header tags with at least four things that SHOULD be, paragraphs not marked as paragraphs, self closing PARAGRAPH tag (that's invalid markup) Nonsensical indenting that makes me shocked to see htmltidy listed as a generator. Multiple generator meta's. (that's probably WHY the indenting is all screwy) 13k of markup for 1.6k of content - there's no reason the HTML for that should be more than 6k. Taking all that into consideration, I pity any poor fool that tries to apply CSS to that - just hacking around IE being in quirks mode ALONE is enough to rip one's hair out, much less the class heavy non-semantic markup with inlined presentation making styling the whole thing a royal pain in the ass.
If you're talking about the main site, that isn't what would be styled by CSS designers. The member sites are the ones that are open to design. like mine... ajlcom.instantspot.com There is a little inline css but only for the toolbar which we don't want to the style to be altered. Thanks for your input on the main site however.
Same difference... When you see the same class on the same div over and over - that's classitus AND unneccessary when there are no DIV's nested in them. It has a XHTML 1.1 doctype which NO DEPLOYED PAGE should really ever use since browser support for 1.1 is nonexistant... having it work is blind luck. See this: <ul class="first-of-type"> <li class="yuimenubaritem first-of-type"> <a class="yuimenuitemlabel" href="/blog/" title="">The Blog</a> </li> <li class="yuimenubaritem first-of-type"> <a class="yuimenuitemlabel" href="/page/Contact-Me" title="Contact Me">Contact Me</a> </li> <li class="yuimenubaritem first-of-type"> <a class="yuimenuitemlabel" href="/profile" title="Profile">Profile</a> </li> <li class="yuimenubaritem first-of-type"> <a class="yuimenuitemlabel" href="/calendar" title="Events Calendar">Calendar</a> </li> <li class="yuimenubaritem first-of-type"> <a class="yuimenuitemlabel" href="/page/XKCDcom-comics" title="XKCD.com comics">XKCD.com comics</a> </li> <li class="yuimenubaritem first-of-type"> <a class="yuimenuitemlabel" href="/page/Games" title="Games">Games</a> </li> </ul> Code (markup): /FAIL/ HARD. All those classes on the LI should be unneccessary because you aren't nesting, so they should ALL be able to be styled off the parent UL. The only reason to add a class is if they are DIFFERENT - if they are all the same, that **** shouldn't be there. Though that first classname spells out a LOT of what's 'wrong' right there - AGAIN with that stupid Yahoo library crap. Welcome to fat bloated pages with overblown unused CSS, locked font metrics that cause more problems than they solve, etc, etc, etc. ... and it's just as loaded with inlined presentation. align="center" == /FAIL/ - style="float:left;" == /FAIL/ 196 validation errors == I sure as hell don't envy anyone who only has access to the CSS, since the HTML needs to be thrown out and rewritten from scratch.
Well, I can't say it isn't constructive criticism. I think I'll just bite my tongue on what I think of the delivery.