Smashing Magazine - we smash you with the information that will make your life easier. really.

great list, wish I had featured some of these on csselite… I missed a few!

Impressive!

It’s nice to see what we can do with CSS + XHTML but, surely, we need to have in mind that a semantic markup is VERY important to a successful site.

Very impressive list. But I would like to suggest one more site to this list which is missing here. With your permission:

N.Design Studio – very beautiful work!

Cheers!

Very cool!

Wow. Thanks for the inspiring list.

Real beauty. Very inspiring. Thanks for the list.

What an inspiring list! Awesome.

Wow Beautiful!!!

All these sites look eerily the same. I like clean gradients and tabs as much as the next guy, but the shit has to stop. It’s like the 45 degree angle thing during late 1999-2000. (Damn you 2Advanced!) There is nothing impressive about rehashing the same crap over and over. CSS+XHTML does not mean you site needs to look like a trendy web 2.0 logo.

I’m not saying these are not good sites, because most of them are, but good design should look good 10 years later, and these will not. They are part of trend, like low-rise pants and bug-eye glasses. So take off you Von Dutch hat and think up some new ideas.

Yeah, I think http://www.ndesign-studio.com is beautiful and Nick is great CSS designer.

Nice work! I got lost in the list for hours…

Bullshit. Why is it always LOOKS over USABILITY?

I mean there are hundreds of sites that “look nice” but are extremely difficult and tedious to use. Small text, radical colors and contrast, usage of Flash, required scrolling, useless images, too limited effective area without scaling support, non-standard solutions (= difficult to interpret what is a link/button) etc.

The list goes on and on but yet many people deem such sites as incredible.

This site is absolutely knackered in IE7. It doesn’t matter what the browser is, you have to cater for them all. So don’t come trying to tell me what’s good when you obviously can’t build one yourself…

And if I see one more page centered css site with a graphic popped on top of the page I am going to SCREAM.

What about mattbango.com, oh wait, rikcat.com stole his design and then gets the credit.

Really impressive designs! This list is another great resource for inspiration!

Thanks!

Woooooow!

This sites are really very pleasant for the eye!

Great 4 inspiration!!

Yep! Masters of CSS… But i think they forgot about http://www.emanuelblagonic.com, IMHO…
P.S. Как приятно видеть камменты на родном, могучем!!!

Ironic- how screwed up this page is nd they are recognizing good web site design…………….
Not working the way they want in IE6 nor IE7

designs are really nice
but how would i know because your CSS on
this site is messed up

Looks fine in firefox. Stop using ie7 and use a real browser, fool!

Some of these sites are plain inaccessible :(
They aren’t fully css-based

Great list. Some there I think I would put after some others. Thanks for the compilation!

90% have the same aesthetic. Pretty Boring.

fun list but makes me think more of illustrator skills than css skills.

maybe next year, my site get here :)

Just noticed that my home page needed correcting. Cheers, Dan.

I just relaunched my online portfolio, maybe you like it enough to put it on your list? anyway, i would be glad to hear the user opinions on the usability of my site. just post your comments in my kontakt-sektion. (in the moment the site is only german, sorry)

Very impressive list. Mit den Websites kann man sich wochenlang beschäftigen :-) Michael

I agree with Russell about overuse of tabs and gradiants in 2006. I’m guilty of this as well. I have a feeling that in a few years we’ll look back and laugh that all our websites looked the same.

Very pretty!

Hi I’m interesting in CSS but I’m not so good :(
I need a professional help :’(
I want to be ” CSS guru “

This is a site that I’m putting up for contention http://surfcore.co.uk which use an advanced recipe of XHTML, CSS, java script and transparent png’s.

I hope you like…

A good post for web designers.These templates looks very nice.

Inspired by the gorgeous examples above, my blog got a facelift too! http://ilkeryoldas.blogspot.com

太漂亮了！

too many beaty for 1 post

Great design gallery, very nice and useful!
Thank you for the good work.

Great list. Keep up the good work!

All the images are broken! I wanted to share this link with my readers, can you fix it?

Cool list!!!!!!!

veeeeery nice collection… splendid!

Thanks for the awesome review! So good to find a site with all the thumbnails of the sites and not just a list.

beautiful, beautiful, beautiful AMAZING!! I´m depressed now – thx

tomasio,

Banyoles.cat is a web of an administration and I believe that his design is impeccable if we it assimilate to others.

wow, these are so amazing and colorful! I love CSS.

A nice selection of magazines. I also think this is a nice looking site http://www.magsite.co.uk

seems good design but please don’t forget, there are a lot of people have bad connection speed! now i’m still research how to make beautiful design with so low of KB loaded just see my site on yodi.web.ugm.ac.id that’s my research so far

Thanks for this very good article … I use this to my home work to school … Can I translate this with all comments and insert on my site? … Thanks

A nice selection of Websites. some great desgigns. Just shows what is possible!

This site is truly a great resource thanks for all your hard work

A fantastic source of inspiration for us all. I personally am a big fan of CSS

Hi I thank you for a wonderful site. You have done very good job.

I’d just like to thank you for taking the time to create this internet website. It has been extremely helpful

Seguro que estos diseños me motivan :D

It’s very great!

They are really nice, photoshop and css they both perfect.

The sites shown here are visually appealing. The use of css to handle the layout, graphics, backgrounds, links is very well handled. The only issue is the css over takes the message and clouds the content. Sometimes simplicity can speak volumes. Our initial designs for our firms site looked very similar to all the ones shown here. Is that a coincidence. I don’t think so. The web-designer was referencing these sites for layout ideas. I think that is common amongst many designers these days. There is so much out there that looks fantastic, that one feels the urge to do it themself. Most web 2.0 sites look the same. I think we can all agree on that.

Nice list! Similar gallery is also here.

It only took me 4 months to find this. Very nice work, thank you.
all the best, jon

hi! can you say me, where i can buy your magazine.
I live in Puebla, mexico.

i dont’ know if you sell your magazine in my country.
it’s very interesting.

thank you

simply great stuff yar……………

Really great collection, keep it up

Very impressive list, especially I like “haveamint.com” you can almost feel the freshness.

Gracias por la expocisión..muy inspiradora.

Great resource- however -

where are e-commerce designs?? Sure these are all amazing but why hasn’t e-commerce embraced CSS based designs?

Corporate are finally getting there (ESPN, Sprint etc) but still not so many big online retailers are using this.

Someone please post links to these – as getting clients to invest in CSS based designs for e-commerce is still near impossible.

this video and movie site has a good css and ajax combination
I hope you like it…
link

so well-cssed sites!:)

I wish my site http://www.agn.ae was also included in that list.

Amazing stuff here!

Indeed a great list, a 2007 update will be great. I wish some of my websites to be in this list :D.

Great list ! Amazing. Komodio media is really cool :)

Thank you very much for this great list.
I hope to get one day one of my websites in such a listing :P

Pierre – From France

Inspiring! A good material to learn from.

I will go home crying, these designs make my dreams worth nothing. Would you make a list for year 2007?
Good post.

I like most of the designs, but there are no big commercial sites here. You should focus more on designs that have advertising on their sites so that we could get inspiration on how to set up a site with advertising too, it’s not easy.

This is my favorite — http://emotionslive.co.uk/. It’s not with the legs but with everything. It only shows that Mike, the owner of this site, knows his stuff. Just take a look at how he carefully creates shadows and other outlines for each detail or image in his site. Amazing!!!

By the way, this is for the year 2006. Any new list for the year 2007? Have you tried checking AJAX-based web sites?

amaizing css, great..
thanks for share

I was using number 1 before this blog post appeared. I guess it’s going to be a little over-saturated now since this post appeared. :D

Thanks for the post!

Of course, I’m jealous that my visual and CSS skills are just not up to the job, but I find a lot of these sites visually confusing, samey and downright difficult to use. They look pretty, but I wouldn’t want to navigate them for any length of time.

A lot of them don’t strike me as particularly accessible; lots of text rendered as images, for example.

I guess it depends on how you define beauty – but I’d like to see a top 10 of accessible, usable sites.

Great concept…

An Artistic way of approach for a business promotion.
No craps, An eyes to relax while surfing.
Keep up the good work…

Bee Dainsiderz
DXB

Really great !

Great collection of quality designs!

WoOo great list Sir, a great new source of inspiration for me, thanks ;)

A great collection of sites! Nice Work

@im suden, you are totally right.

Thats why i love watching this sites, but when it comes to work, i prefer Facebook – type usable sites…

I`m happy, now website can be like a piece of art. There is some new design navigation ideas. Nice

Hey thank you so much for putting in all the effort to make this article. I show my clients this post all the time to help show them the possibilities of web design and what the current trend is out there. I have found this article extremely helpful and it has helped me recently land a new client. Thanks again!!!

Ok, we talking about nice design here, webdesign, and without no doubt this is nice collection of well designed web sites.
Unfortunately some of this sites are miscoded, some of them badly miscoded…
I have feeling that visitors of smashingmagazine.com have strong sense for correctly written code, so I was surprised when I saw sites without doctype ;(