One of the most time consuming parts of web design, speaking for myself of course, has always been building grid systems.
Sure, the idea of floating elements is not really that hard to grasp, but laying out complex web pages can still offer quite a challenge. It’s not that the work is hard; it’s just hard work.
It’s not that the work is hard; it’s just hard work.
Despite that, it took quite some time before I decided to try one of the available packages – after that I was sold pretty much on the get-go. The concept is quite simple: you import a style sheet with predefined classes, which allows you to deal with a simple 12 column grid instead of single pixels. Creating a simple two column layout is as simple as designating 4 columns for the sidebar and 8 columns for the content; widths, margins and floats are all taken care of by the system.
For this site we went with 960 Grid System (www.960gs.com), which both includes the necessary stylesheets, but also templates for Photoshop and other design applications. If you haven’t already – I recommend that you try it out!
