Sometimes, when you are looking for a new website design – or inspiration for things you can bring to your own website, it is best to check with those who do it best first.  CSSbake is a resource where you can do exactly that.  It features all the perfect ingredients when it comes to baking your proverbial website.

I really like the whole theme of this website, as far as the idea goes.  They break the website designs they feature into ingredients.  So, if you wanted to check out websites with great 404 pages – you would check out the 404 page ingredients category.  If you wanted to see nice form examples, visit the forms ingredients page.  Here are some of the other ingredients they feature:

• Archives
• Navigation
• Post Data
• Pagination
• Headers
• Footers
• Sidebars
• Backgrounds

Not only is this a great place to check out some amazing design work – it also serves as a way to contact tons of fantastic web designers, just in case you are looking for somebody to help you with your next website redesign.

Want to start your web design cooking class? Visit CSSbake.com.

When it comes to redesigning your website, sometimes you only want to make small changes.  Maybe you just want to see what one webpage element would look like like over here, rather than over there.  Rather than messing up your website layout, try using the Liquid Page bookmarklet.

I am not going to claim to know how this awesome bookmarklet works, but it does.  Ok, maybe it is some JavaScript voodoo magic.  This video does a great job at describing the process.

Here is a little more about the bookmarklet from the developer:

Drag the link (“LIQUID PAGE”) shown below to your browser’s bookmarks toolbar. You can then use it on any web page. Simply load the page and then click the link. Be aware: You cannot try the functionality out on this page by simply clicking the link (it’s in an iframe). Please also note that there is a slight delay after clicking while some Javascript (i.e. jQuery) is being loaded – just wait for the confirmation dialog.

Go grab this awesome web design bookmarklet at AlexSchreyer.net.

Creating a nice website framework can sometimes take weeks or month to do right, and perfect.  That is why Instant Blueprint is so impressive.  It allows anybody out there to create a website framework in seconds.  All you have to do is customize, select your website technologies you need to use and your done.

When you are getting started, you give your project a name, select the document type, select the JavaScript library you wish to use, the index extension, and if you want to wrap the centered div or not.

Where it says (X)HTML/CSS Mark Up, this is where you would add your id tags for your design (one per line).  Once finished, the zipped file you download has a index setup with your code ready to be played with, and separate folders for JavaScript, images, and CSS.

Overall, this is a handy tool to keep in your web development bookmarks.  Play around with Instant Blueprint, and see if it saves you any time the next time you create your own website framework.

Looking for the best way to tweak or develop your own snipits of HTML or CSS code in a hurry?  CSS Desk is here to help.  This website delivers a dynamic virtual workbench for you to play with your HTML and CSS code on.

The layout of the web site is very simple to learn.

You have your HTML code in the top left corner, your CSS code in the bottom left corner, and the live preview on the right of the web page.  Whatever changes you make in the HTML or CSS are reflected live on the example to the right.

You can also choose to turn the highlighting and automatic formatting of the HTML and CSS code off or on if you wish, and change the desktop pattern from blue to a number of different non-intrusive colors and patterns.

Want to share your example?  Just click the share button to get a sharable URL generated for you to copy and paste to your web design buddies.  You can also download everything you have done to your PC, so your never locked into having to use CSS Desk all by itself.

CSS Desk is by far one of the most amazing desktop CSS and HTML sandboxes I have seen.  Now, while you might not use it to code an entire website, it does come in handy when designing certain elements.  You can go check it out and play with it yourself at CSSDesk.com.

With web site design, setting up the cool rounded corners can sometimes be a pain to figure out.  So that is where cool tools like the simply named Border Radius come into play.  It was built to make the process so much easier.

With this online tool, you can generate CSS code for CSS3, as well as engine-specific code for the WebKit and Gecko rendering engines to make your corners all rounded.

To use it, all you have to do is type in a number into one of the corner boxes.  This will tell the tool by how many pixels you want the corner to be rounded:

Then, the CSS code is spit out by the web site automatically.

At the bottom of the page, you can tell the web site by which rendering engines you want the code to work with.  For the most part, I would suggest just keeping all three checked.

Border Radius is a helpful web development tool that I think every webmaster should keep bookmarked and ready for their next big web design project.  Now if there was only a tool that would make this CSS awesomeness work in Internet Explorer’s wacky rule set, we’d be all set.

Are you a web designer wanting to submit your awesome web site design to a ton of galleries at once?  Look no further than cssGallerySubmission. It is the easiest way to submit your web design to all the CSS galleries around the Web.

To get started, all you have to do is visit the submission page, and give them a few details such as your name, e-mail address, design URL, site description, tags and the like.  Then you can use this information to fill in the “submission” pages for each CSS or design gallery you wish to submit to.

Some of the web site design galleries supported include:

• WordPress.org
• CSSMania.com
• Designm.ag
• CSSdrive.com
• DesignShack.co.uk

Right now there are 281 active web site design galleries you can submit your layout and design to.  This tool is perfect for designers that need an easy way to get their free themes out to the public on all of the Web most popular places for getting such galleries.

Give it a shot for yourself at cssgallerysubmission.com.

Searching the Web for a few great bookmarklets to make your web site coding a little easier?  I have found a great collection of them over at Squarfree.com.  You can drag and drop any of these bookmarlets to your saved bookmarks to use later. 

• test styles – Type in CSS rules to experiment or to create a temporary user style sheet.
• edit styles – Experiment with changes to the page’s style sheet.
• ancestors - Lists the ancestors of any element you hover over in the status bar.
• computed styles – Lists the computed styles of an element and of its ancestors.
• zap style sheets – Disables all style sheets.

Most of these bookmarks work for Firefox only, but a few will work with Internet Explorer and Opera too.  Go chec out the Web Development Bookmarklets page at Squarefree.com to check out the 18 other tools they have for you to use.

Working on a logo, a web site design, or any type of graphic work?  If you are, and your stuck in the design process – not knowing where to turn next – I have ten great sources to get your inspiration back. 

1. Open Source Vector Art – tons of logos, in vector form, to find your muse.
2. Design Snack – a great “digg-like” layout resource, where you can vote for the best.
3. CSS Princess – a showcase of some great unique CSS-powered designs.
4. Desizn Tech – great blog for design lovers of any kind.
5. Open Source Web Design – the name says it all, tons of free themes to check out here.
6. Best CSS Gallery – check out some of the best CSS powered themes here.
7. OriginMaker – another good blog the highlights some of the best layouts on the web.
8. Design By Grid – tips and tutorials to help you do grid-based layouts and designs.
9. Stylegala – awesome database of designs, layouts and resources.
10. CSS Bag – grab a sack of design goodness or just check out the gallery of sites.

Have another favorite of yours that you would like to share?  Let me know!

Those people outside of the world of web design might sit and wonder, “Why might somebody need an entire web site dedicated to creating made up words?”.  However, those people inside of the web design world know that dummy text generation makes it handy to test a web site without having to fill it up with real content, just yet.  Needing some dummy text of your own?  Check out and save the Blind Text Generator for help.

This online tool will allow you to select from several different dummy text types (from Lorem ipsum all the way to Pangram) .  You can also set it up by the number of words or the number of characters.  Last, but not least, you can setup how many paragraphs you need too.

One more secret to this site I would like to share with you.  If you click on the advanced options, you can setup the CSS stylings for the dummy text too.  So this is not only a dummy text provider.  It can also help you style your web site font, or at least try new things – without messing up your own web site design.

The dummy text generator Blind Text Generator is free to use, and should be a bookmark to share with all the designers you know and love.

I am always looking for great web development resources to share, but this time around I am going to give you a link that also highlights the best of the best when it comes to designer or developer tools.  Corkdump.com is one of the best resource web sites for webmasters.

They provide resources for:

• CSS/XHTML
• JavaScript/AJAX
• Flash/ActionScript
• Photoshop/Illustrator
• Blog Resources
• Design Insperation
• PHP/MySQL

That is not all, but I have to leave you with a few surprises, right?  So if you want a database of some of the best web developer links – check out and bookmark corkdump.com.  You will not be disappointed.