Using CSS in your pagan web site

I'm an "old-school" HTML and dynamic web-site programmer who is becoming convinced there has to be a better way to do these things.
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So in my lust for designing better sites, I opened my mail one day to read a note from a colleague who said only "Zen my son... Zen..."
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A link to the "css Zen Garden" was stragetically placed at the bottom of my mysterious Master's email, and I clicked it, expecting to see something good. In this case, it was something earthshaking.
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Using my trusty FireFox (the only true browser), I embarked on a truly fascinating experience where content was seperate from look and feel, tables were few and far between and a single style sheet drove the look and feel in ways that one might easily feel was a miracle.
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You too can visit the magickal garden at
http://www.csszengarden.com
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The Zen Garden features a common set of content, detailing the philosophy and methods used to manage the site. The true magick of the site resides in the fact that you can select from many different look and feels while preserving the very same content! The sheer variety of user-submitted CSS variations is astounding.

I have never spent a lot of time messing about in CSS programming, save for a few simple class declarations here and there, but these guys have taken the true promise of CSS to the extreme, showing that it is possible to mostly seperate the content from the art and layout aspects of the site.
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Favorite variations include "Mozart", "Organica Creativa" and "Peace of Mind." There are a huge number of submission styles and types to view, and these are all in the public-domain, allowing for you to find a design that might be close to your perfect ideal and to hone from there!
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Each submission to the css Zen Garden has been reviewed by the site owners and is subjected to strict criteria to provide some form of quality control and design standards that allow for quaility to shine and share in the spotlight with creative inspiration and imagination.
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Web sites deserve to be amazing and stand-out from the normal left-right menu displays of similar text and look/feel that pervade the entire web. I've read that people decide in the first 1/20 of a second about if they'll stay on a site or not. Look and feel are important and compelling. You must be able to hook the reader to get their time. This is classical marketing as well as art!
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The css Zen Garden is the first site that I've run into the attempts to leverage this in a way that gets past the hurdles of designing sites by using bounded tables and programmer-driven modes of site-building and to use an artistic and visual presentation effected by control of a single file to radically alter the presentation and thus give true artistic control and freedom to the designer.
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From a technical perspective, the only rules are to use the starting templates that are provided at css Zen Garden. Just look for the two starter files and download them. You can edit and alter these to your heart's content!
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From a new-age and Pagan perspective, this is an ideal platform for designing a wide-range of freeware templates that will allow a relatively non-technical user to post content to a site without having to worry about the look and feel aspects of the site.
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The ability to radically shift the style sheet while preserving content also allows for the complexion of the site to change and "flow around" the content in a nearly seamless manner.
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<b>Downsides</b>
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The inability of browsers to "agree" on the CSS implementations is a factor, but there is enough agreement that make it possible for sites like "Zen" to show the promise of the future.
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Also, many sites these days are NOT static, but driven by databases (ie: This blog site!). A compromise of sorts has to occur in order for the look and feel of a site to mix with the database driven aspects of content itself. I predict that future blogs will move towards the ideal of allowing seamless look/feel changes from the single CSS file, controlling the entire presentation conviently and most powerfully.
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In my own case, using Dreamweaver to control the site creation and presentation allows for using a safe and CSS-aware means of truly managing the project.
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<b>A real project</b>
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So, you've read this far and are interested in trying it for yourself. If you decide to build a New-Age or Pagan site based on the example template and tools of the css Zen Garden, please email me your link or code samples to share with others on this site (or paste the information in the comments section under this story).
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I am intending to build a range of CSS Zen Garden templates as giveaways for Pagan site builders to use, with my ulitmate goal to fuse Geeklog (my current portal software) with "zen" concepts. We'll see how far I get!
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In the meantime, blessed be and feel free to comment or share with us your ideas and lessons!
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<b>Links of interest:</b>
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1. http://www.macromedia.com/dreamweaver<br>;
2. http://www.csszengarden.com
3. http://www.csszengarden.com/zengarden-sample.html
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4. http://www.csszengarden.com/zengarden-sample.css
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