I've never quite understood those hearty souls who regard hand coding as the only true way to build Web sites. In the heady economic times now gone, building sites by hand—and starting from scratch on each and every site—seemed proof positive that you were a real Web person. WYSIWYG web editors, such as Dreamweaver, were…well simply beneath contempt. Nothing like shrinking budgets to bring all of us back to reality.
With everyone now looking for ways to do more with less, the use of grids in designing and building Web sites is getting new, and well-deserved, attention. After all, why reinvent the wheel with each new Web site? A vital design tool, grids let designers cut to the chase. And grab eyeballs to boot.
A relatively new site, The Grid System, is serving as a nice clearing house for all things grid and Web. Lots of articles to help you get started on creating XHTML and CSS pages that will display well on big, old computers and the growing pocket universe of Blackberrys and iPhones. Jeffrey Zeldman has been preaching much the same gospel for ages over at A List Apart.
(Tip of the hat to Subtraction's Khoi Vinh for pointing to the site. As one of the chief architects of the gridlicious NYT site, Vinh definitely walks the talk.)
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