New Template – Touches of Pearl

This design was born out of a general idea, and the colors selected from ones that are my mother’s favorites. She’s always had a love for pink and gray, and she adores pearls, so that was the inspiration for this design. She also hates clutter in websites, so I was careful to try to keep white space as much as possible.

The main area of the page fills 80% of the window, the header and footer areas fill 100%. The main page has a three column look, with the second column actually containing two separate columns as well. The layout is ideal for screens with a 1024 resolution width and higher, but works fine for smaller screens as well.

I have used a shocking (for me at least) 21 images in this design. The total file size of those images comes to 18.2k all together. However, with the exception of the image placeholder box used in different places, all of the images are background images and the site looks perfectly fine without them. The vast majority of the icons come from the popular free Silk Icons set.

As always, this website is XHTML 1.0 Strict, is completely tableless for layout, and has been tested in Firefox, IE 6 and IE 7 Beta 2, Opera, Konqueror, and Safari.

There is an alternate subpage layout that is a single column look. On the subpage you will find all of the included styles given as examples of use. On the subpage I have also added links in a little section at the bottom that might be good for webpage tagging and bookmarking.

For this design, I have also taken a more careful hand with the typography and extra styles so that I could convey the clean, elegant, look I was going for.

While I normally include a series of different styles that can be used, I went a little bit further this time and created more. I made many quick classes for general use, things like bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, and highlight.

You can see all of the included special styles shown on the subpage.

This template is free, open-source, following only the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 license.

Preview of design Touches of Pearl.

Feel free to go to the main page for it where you can preview and download the layout.

As always, feel free to post your questions / comments about the design here.

Enjoy!

~Nicole