Background images make pages look good, but also make them slower. Each background image is an extra HTTP request. There's a fix: combine background images into a CSS sprite. But creating sprites is hard, requiring arcane knowledge and lots of trial and error. SpriteMe removes the hassles with the click of a button.

Faceted navigation addresses the universal need to narrow. Consequently, this pattern has become nearly ubiquitous in e-commerce, given the availability of structured metadata and the clear business value of improving product findability. Faceted navigation is being deployed rapidly across an impressively wide variety of contexts and platforms. In the world of search, faceted navigation is everywhere.

The tabs in this demo are image-less tabs with 4 different CSS3 enhancements: Rounded Corners (border-radius) Box Shadow (bottom of inactive tabs) Transitions (the glow on hover) Gradients (the active tab)

Denise Jacobs reveals her top tips on how to use the most exciting CSS3 properties - and provide fallbacks for older browsers

"Conclusion FlexBox and Columns aside, it's still not definite which new layout modules will be fully implemented cross-browser. I'd say that Positioned Floats and Exclusions are very similar, and could easily be merged (indeed, this seems to be happening). Grid Layout has subsumed Template Layout, and will definitely be in IE10. Regions has already been implemented in a fork of WebKit, so could appear in WebKit browsers (Safari, Chrome, etc) very quickly. So I'd be willing to predict that with some changes to syntax, most of what you see here will make it into CSS3 in the future. If that's the case, I think it's a good thing; these new methods are complementary, not competing, and with a minimum of work will allow us to build very sophisticated websites a few years from now."

"Method 3: Box Shadow As mentioned, the idea for this experiment was the result of serendipitous fiddling with box-shadow settings. I personally like this one the best, because it's just one line of code, and it uses a new technology in an unexpected way."

Up to this point, the most common use for CSS3 Transitions has been in conjunction with the well-known CSS :hover pseudo-class.

Usability tests have shown that the single greatest impediment to users of the Swinburne Web Site is the lack of consistent design elements. The purpose of this style guide is to define standards and provide templates in relation to material published on Swinburne's web site. It is also intended to act as a reference tool for publishers in relation to web design in general.

A powerful Photoshop-like CSS gradient editor from ColorZilla.