The whiteboard is your friend

The beauty (and the bane) of CSS based layout is that it can be as easy or as complicated as one wishes it to be.

Me? I'm lazy and not very smart, so I generally prefer easy. That's why I use my whiteboard to plan out and refine my CSS layouts before I type a single line of code.

Drawing a preliminary layout on the whiteboard allows me to literally visualize what I am planning to do before I start. I have found I can save many hours of development time this way. Somehow the physical drawing of the layout seems to help me think through the logic of why I want to lay it out one way over another.

I have found that when I use my whiteboard, I pare down my design and eliminate bloat before I even start coding. I can often lay out a page in 3-5 well planned DIVs rather than 37 extraneous nested DIVs that try to compensate for some misbehaving element.

"Plan your work and work your plan" can and does apply to CSS based layout. The extra 20-30 minutes spent with a dry-erase marker and whiteboard (or pencil and paper) can save you hours of hassle down the line.

Easy cheesy!

I do mine in my word processor and you are right. plan first and then whip it out...well, not quite that fast yet, but getting there.

Funny you should mention this, I'm doing something with lots of bg images and I laid it all out with pen and paper before going near a computer. It required quite a few extra spans and what not and the planning I did has made everything go just a little smoother.

It's good advice.

Pete.

I personally mock it up in Photoshop first...then go to paper and draw out the div layout...sometimes tracing paper that I oput over the screen on top of my photoshop document...or I make a new transparent white overlay on my PS document and draw the divs like that.

I can't jump inot a site and start coding without knowing what i'm doing!

I sometimes design and code on-the-fly but for very complex designs there si no point, you'll just end up with a lot of extraneous mark-up. On the flip-side though, I would never go through this whole process for very simple layouts as it would be a complete waste of my time.

Like with all things, it depends on the project.

Pete.