When I design web sites, I start with a few design principles in mind:
I have written code that runs on my web server to generate all my CSS style sheets. I specify the colors in one place, and the generator applies those colors in all the dozens (or hundreds) of places the colors need to go. It even automatically adjusts the contrast, so text is always easy to read against the background color I pick. I can make an entire new color scheme in under a half hour, and most of that is picking from the many great-looking colors which ones best match my site's mood. This has designing my web site be much easier — I never have to think about text being legible!
To pick which great color combinations I want, I have a web page that displays them all, in the styles of paragraphs and menus I use. See the Lerner Consulting Style Generator and contact me if you are interested in using it. Saves hours of tedious work by applying good color combinations to your whole site!
The style sheet generator works with all the styles used in this web site (normal pages, ad pages, menus, tables), plus I have customized the free Amazon Products Feed script to use it.
The Style Sheet Generator has a great 2-level menu, that will work on any browser that uses CSS (while displaying as a normal list in browsers without CSS), looks good no matter what screen size or text size your visitor uses, and is easy for you to maintain (adding, moving, or deleting pages). It permits you to be extremely flexible in how you design the order of your pages, and how many pages you can have in your site. Unlike programs such as FrontPage which use a strict "organization chart" for the menu system, you can have pages in multiple places in your menu — wherever they make sense for your visitors.
It uses a tiny bit of Javascript, and so the code looks a little messy. To modify the items on the menu, just copy a menu item from the source of one of these web pages, and put in your own menu text.
There are also two one-level menus included, one for horizontal layout and one vertical, based on List-U-Like. These are simply HTML lists with a style class applied, and so are very easy to modify. Great for anywhere you want a submenu, to offer your users pages that are closely related to the one they are on.
If you really want to, you can customize your menu look with the List-U-Like CSS Generator, and then modify the results to use the style sheet generator. I have written instructions on using List-U-Like.
Your visitors might prefer a style sheet you made other than your default one. With a menu item, let your visitors pick which of your style sheets they prefer, and have your website remember it for them (uses a cookie). You put a call to choose-css.pl instead of a link to a style sheet, in the head section of each page. Puts all your other style sheets in the page header as alternate style sheets' for browsers such as FireFox that can access them. (Included with the Style Sheet Generator).
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