gallery
This page provides a wide variety of sample sites, all of them guaranteed to be well designed. Some are award winners, some are simply nice-looking sites, and some are frankly cutting edge stuff that uses Flash and other interesting things. There are also a few omnibus sites with links to other well-designed examples. Finally, just for fun, there are also a couple of sites featuring horrible Web pages--just to make sure you know what they look like!
You can use these sites for inspiration, and you can always look at the code by using View > Source. Now that most good sites use style sheets, it's not as easy to see all of the things that are going on behind the page, but you can still see the basic page code. And you can look at the style sheets too by copying the url for the sheet that's found in the page head section.
omnibus sites | sites using css | sites using mixed code | out there | "bad" sites
omnibus sites
- Zen Gardens, an experiment in using CSS design by different designers
- Lab 404. Designer Curt Cloninger's collection of favorite Web designs (that tend to be pretty "cutting edge")
sites using css
- Blue Robot by Rob Chandanais. Those leaves are actually background images.
- Perkins School for the Blind: a model of accessibility
- The New York Public Library: Accessibility and lots of Web information
- WalkingBirds: a "lo-fi record-at-home urban folk/acoustic rock project"
- Adactio, which allows you to choose the design you prefer for the site (hint: it uses style sheets)
- What Do I Know: from Dominey Design
- R. Squared Communications
- 13th Parallel Web design
- Omega Glacier Research Project
- Zeldman.com from Web guru Jeffrey Zeldman
sites using mixed code
Note: Many of these sites use Flash rather than HTML, which makes them neat looking but limits accessibility.
- Kaliber 10000 magazine
- Three.Oh digital design journal
- Artnet.com
- Netdiver: a new media magazine
- The Museum of Modern Art
- The Little Czech Primer
- Textism from Dean Allen
out there
- 2112 FX
- Design Project from Audrey Falkon
- The XXII Group "Design without Frontiers"
- Malevole. An amazing site done with a combination of CSS and JavaScript
- Understanding USA. Richard Saul Wurman's Web version of his book on US statistics
- Diane Fenster illustration
bad sites
- Html Gone Bad
- Web Pages That Suck
- How to Make an Annoying Web Page.
- Ten Ways to Tell If You Have a Sucky Web Page
- File 404. Not exactly a bad page--the best 404 code ever.