Powerful CSS-Techniques For Effective Coding

• By Vitaly Friedman
• February 21st, 2008
• CSS, Techniques
• 119 Comments

Sometimes being a web-developer is just damn hard. Particularly coding is often responsible for slowing down our workflow, reducing the quality of our work and sleepless nights with pizza and coffee laying around the laptop. Reason: with a number of incompatibility issues and quite creative rendering engines it sometimes takes too much time to find a workaround for some problem without addressing browsers with quirky hacks. And that’s where ready-to-use solutions developed by other designers come in handy.

One year ago we’ve published the post with 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without where we provided references to the most useful CSS-techniques which are often used in almost every project. Over the last year we’ve been observing what’s happening with the CSS-based web-development, and we collected most useful CSS-techniques we’ve stumbled upon — for us and for our readers.

In this post we present 50 new CSS-techniques, ideas and ready-to-use solutions for effective coding. You definitely know some of them, but definitely not all of them. Some technique is missing? Let us know in the comments to this post.

Thanks to all developers who contributed to the CSS-based design over the last year. The community appreciates it.

CSS-Techniques

1. Triadic Background Setting with CSS
The Silverback web site uses three background images to create the illusion of 3D with simple CSS. No documentation is provided, however the source code is quite intuitive. [via Wilson Miner]

2. Creative Use of PNG Transparency in Web Design
With proper PNG support in Internet Explorer 7, and some handy JavaScript and CSS tricks to account for older browsers, we can use PNG images to greatly enhance our design vocabulary.

3. CSS Server-Side Pre-Processor

4. Advanced CSS Menu

5. CSS SiteMap

6. Styling File Inputs with CSS and the DOM
File inputs (<input type=”file” />) are the bane of beautiful form design. No rendering engine provides the granular control over their presentation designers desire. This simple, three-part progressive enhancement provides the markup, CSS, and JavaScript to address the long-standing irritation.

7. A Savvy Approach to Copyright Messaging
Derek Powazek suggests adding a copyright message to a photo and use CSS to crop its view. This is supposed to accomplish the goal of adding robust copyright information without defacing your own work.

8. Particletree Category List

9. Advanced CSS Menu Trick
What we want to do here, is instead of simply altering the state of the navigation item the user is currently rolling over, we want to alter the non navigation items as well.

10. CSS hover effect

11. Creating a table with dynamically highlighted columns like Crazy Egg’s pricing table

12. A Stripe of List Style Inspiration
A different type of list and navbar styling. As stripes.

13. Rediscovering the Button Element

14. Dynamic CSS With Variables
Geoffrey Grosenbach describes how you can integrate CSS variables in CSS coding — with Ruby on Rails.

15. Hyperlink Cues with Favicons
I wanted to extend the concept of hyperlink cues a little. For links that point to external sites, what if, instead of showing a generic ‘external link’ icon, we showed that site’s favicon?

16. A CSS styled table version 2

17. CSS Step Menu
A method of designing the so-called step-menus, which have some steps users have to go through in order to achieve some aim. This menu offers a varying amount of steps, dependent upon the type of user accessing the application.

18. Creating bulletproof graphic link buttons with CSS | 456 Berea Street

19. Iconize Textlinks with CSS
Links are fun, but sometimes we don’t know where they take us. With this little CSS technique a user can identify a link by its icon. The updated release of the technique.

20. Better Ordered Lists (Using Simple PHP and CSS)
Ordered lists are boring! Sure you can apply background images and do quite a bit of sprucing up to a regular ordered list, but you just don’t get enough control over the number itself.

21. Circular Menu with CSS
This article shows how a beautiful circular navigation menu is created. In Spanish with Source code and an example.

22. CSS Dock Menu

23. Digg-like navigation bar using CSS
This tutorial explains how to design a digg-like navigation bar using a liquid design with rounded corners for links.

24. 13 Awesome Javascript CSS Menus
13 “fresh” JavaScript+CSS-based navigation menus in a brief overview. Among other things Slashdot Menu and Sexy Sliding Menu displayed below.

25. CSS Pricing Matrix
A CSS-based matrix in which clicking on a highlights the associated cell in the top row and left column giving an indication of relationships among the provided information. Similar solution: Tablecloth.

26. CSS List Expander
So, we have an unordered list that can go on in depth as much as we want. The script analyzes the list tree and applies toggle functions for expanding/collapsing child objects.

27. How to create VISTA style toolbar with CSS
Reproducing Vista toolbar, with buttons and hover effect in cross-browser compatible CSS and (X)HTML.

28. Fade Out Bottom
This is a demonstration of the effect where the bottom of the page seems to fade out. The technique makes use of an fixed position div (bottom: 0%) with a transparent PNG image and a high z-index value.

29. Scrollovers – A New Way of Linking
Everyone is familiar with hover-effects. This CSS+JavaScript-based techniques creates the Scrolleffect – not really necessary, but it’s nice to know, how it can be done.

30. How to Style an A to Z Index with CSS

31. CSS List Boxes
Using a simple unordered list this experiment aligns the boxes across the page with the end result being to showcase items like services, products, or specials. One of cool thing about this — if you turn off styles — is the extractable semantics with the headings and paragraphs used.

32. How-to create a “Table of Contents” Navigation
In as little as 8 lines of HTML, and 5 lines of CSS, the Table Of Contents Navigation block can be integrated in your site ready for even more styling.

33. CSS Recipe for Success

34. Partial Opacity

35. Simple Round CSS Links (Wii Buttons)

36. How to make sexy buttons with CSS

37. CSS Pull Quotes

38. Drop Shadow CSS

39. CSS Speech Bubbles
Easy to customize speech bubbles coded in CSS and valid XHTML 1.0 strict.Tested in all major browsers.

40. CSS Double Lists

41. Perspective Text with CSS

42. Better Email Links: Featuring CSS Attribute Selectors
Learn how to generate code for displaying the e-mail automatically once mailto is used. CSS Attribute Selectors in action which is not supported by Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

43. CSS: Menu Descriptions
This is a CSS technique that could be useful if you want to give users accessible added content such as tool-tips, notifications, or alerts, without adding unnecessary clutter to your page. And since it doesn’t rely of JavaScript, it should be useful to everyone, even disabled users.

Further Techniques

44. CSS Transparency Settings for All Browsers

45. Time Sensitive CSS Switcher
CSS Switching script that changes style sheet based on time of day.

46. Custom Reading Containers
This amazing little script allows the user to resize any container.

47. Eric Meyer’s CSS Reset

48. PNG Overlay
Create a transparent PNG overlay which can be used as a mask / frame around regular JPEG or GIF so users can upload photos without having to worry about using any graphics program to apply filters, plus it saves time.

49. Turning Lists into Trees

50. Create Resizable Images With CSS