I received what I consider a gauntlet thrown down yesterday. He said:

What I find to be funny is that EVERY table-less website I have looked at all look the same. Where is the creativity, how can one business stand out in a crowd when they all look the same?

So, I want to see them. Show me your CSS layouts. Do they all look the same? He goes on to say:

especially for all of you that use WordPress, Joomla and Drupal

And I have to agree there - it's interesting to me how many sites that use those CMS/blog tools tend to have the same look and feel, just different colors. So I'd love to see some CSS-based sites that use WordPress, Joomla, or Drupal that break the mold. I'll start: a site I built a while ago called EnjoyScifi uses CSS and not tables for layout, and it's a WordPress managed site. And even this site still has a bloggy style to it (two columns, narrow right navigation column, wider left main column with blog entries separated in boxes). So I'm sure there are better ones out there. Post your URLs in the comments. Thanks!

ThinkVitamin recently posted an article by Ben Huh, from I Can Has Cheezburger? If you haven't heard of that site, it's a photo site generally of cats with silly captions. The photos and the captions are provided by the community. In fact, in a way, the entire site is community - there's virtually nothing else there. I admit it, I go to ICHC nearly every day. It's a great site to get happy for a few minutes. I couldn't even tell you which of Ben's tips is the most useful, there are so many there that I want to take to heart for the community sites I manage. But here are a couple of the ones I like the best:

• Be willing to prune your community. Sure, you want to encourage people to participate. But trolls just drive people away. By deleting their posts as soon as you see them, and making sure your regulars know that you do that, you keep your community a fun place for people to be.
• Empower your community. Make it easy for people to join in, even in simple ways. And the more they join in, the more they will return.
• Provide information about your community. He calls this "info porn". Essentially, it's information about the people participating in your community.
• Make people happy. If they're happy, they'll come back, and they'll tell their friends.

Some of us are morning people, some are night owls, but most likely there is a certain time of day when you feel most creative. I tend to get most of my creative ideas in early evening. So, I spend my mornings either taking care of my son or reading email or doing research - things that don't require a lot of creativity. I try to do my writing and design work in the early evenings, when I'm feeling most creative. When do you feel most creative with your Web design work?

So, I was working on a page yesterday and was nearly finished. I just needed to copy the content from the data file into the XML and upload it all to the server. But then my son started screaming downstairs. I thought, "I'm so close, I'll just speed up a bit and run downstairs to console him, so Mark won't go crazy." So instead of copying the content from the data file, I copied the XML into the data file - overwriting the content. No problem, I've got Ctrl-Z undo, right? Well, sure, but when the undo is larger than the buffer that's saved, well... <sigh> It was gone. I had to rebuild the content from scratch. So much for quickly going downstairs.

Have you ever made a mistake like that? Joseph discovered that he needed to learn more about his Web design program when all his links switched unexpectedly. And lots of other people have had similar problems with Web design. It's not all fun colors and layouts. If you've ever made a mistake when working on a Web design project, believe me, you're not alone. I've received over 40 Horror Stories. Why not tell your story I promise not to post your name - unless you want me to.