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Some fine looking websites here, but also a nice illustration that “CSS-based” means nothing when applied to semantically incorrect markup. Some of these sites are even plain inaccessible.

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!!

This all looks like some Wordpress themes. Very generic and derivative stuff.

2006 has been a great year for CSS-based website. Congratulations to all and great compilation!

Wow what that ! Please respect the standard ! IE7 is more standard as FF ! But the result suck ! And check your JS too :-)

undefined values :-(

Else a nice idea :-)

See you !

Good selection… nice webpages.

Mediocre. All sites have the same layout, all they changed are the images.

inspiring list here.

i wish all of the sites were still the same, but some of them were changed. that makes the snapshots worthy.

Those are some amazing designs. Surprisingly, there were even some designs that I would use over my current one. I wonder if anyone reads these comments, eh?

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.

Sorry, but banyoles ist rather average design. What’s good on this? The CSS-Code? *shrug*

very nice!

Really smashing and nice designs. Do you sell these templates? :)

Yes, these designs are really useful to find new ideas and concepts. Thanks.

WoW! This is great! Wonderful source of inspiration.

too many beaty for 1 post

thank for this beauteful cites. css is a very good thing. you can do many things by it.

Nice list! Really like the ones that do not look like every other wordpress blog.

Nice list. You have excellent taste.

Can’t see the screenshots!
Is your image server down?

good,i like some…not all

Iam a webdesigner from india, i never expected this much of talent in the and cretivity peoples having, iam stunned see these websites, really amaging websites, cool colors and great combinations.

Beautiful sites maybe but not css based. Well this is in respect of one site anyway. The foxie.ru site is just images – placed in tables. It doesn’t even have alt tags. Waste of time and effort. It breaks if you try to make the images larger to read the text. The text is all images.

To put it bluntly I can’t say it is beautiful or css based. So one out of your 50 is not really what you say it is!

Rich

when i see this websites i am become a friend of css and i try to make this type website by Css really it is super

Regards
rupesh

All good stuff

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.

Nice Page with interesting comments. useful to build a new site

best site of its kind :-)

That’s a really great list. Thanks for sharing. Really like the vibrant designs collection. Rgds, Dave

Hi,wow thats a lot of links,it must took you forever!This is very interesting,i love your topics.you sound very educated when it comes to these kinds of things.Me,im just learning css and html,it can be very confusing!Keep at it.Feel free to leave me an e mail sometime:)

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.

Ok i like the designs, any chance of a real elegant one that i could use for free.

Web design is not my thing but was asked to set up a website to help people who have been abused.

I would love to know how you guys create such beautiful images, i know what i want but cant design it figred i am alcking the brains so i am going the cheeky route.

Best wishes

Kim

Great list, some i never saw before!

check out a new css gallery with very high selection standards

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 ;(