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Proper use and best practices sIFR is a powerful tool. So powerful, in fact, that you can completely ruin a web page with it if you get overzealous and don’t exercise restraint.

sIFR is for headlines, pull quotes, and other small swaths of text

type which accents the rest of the page. Body copy should remain browser text.

Free design templates don’t have to be unattractive, inaccurate and boring. Some web-sites offer high quality templates for the best price you would ever get - for free. You can download Flash-based templates as well as CSS-based layouts absolutely free; furthermore, you can use them for your personal and commercial projects without any restrictions whatsoever. Still, before using some of the templates, throw a glance at the license agreements - they’re changing all the time.

Name classes/IDs based on function, not appearance. If you create a .smallblue class, and later get a request to change the text to large and red, the class stops making any form of sense. Instead use descriptive classes like .copyright and .pullquote.

When in doubt, validate.

When relying on floats for layouts, make sure they clear properly.

In November 2005 I presented on pro.html.it a three-part article on creating CSS layouts using techniques like negative margins, any order columns and in some case opposite floats. The main goal of the article was getting the maximum number of layouts based on the same markup, each with valid CSS and HTML, without hacks nor workaround and a good cross-browser compatibility. The result is a set of 40 layouts that we've thought worth sharing: on each of them you'll find also a download link (if you want, you can download the entire collection, 40 HTML pages in a single zip file). Further details can be found below the gallery.