For those of you who haven’t heard of it the CSSOff is a mark up competition run by Unmatched style the essential premise of which is you get a design in the form of a image (a PSD or a PNG as you prefer) and then you take it away and mark it up with HTML and CSS and then submit it, get feedback and scoring on your effort and you’re in with the chance of winning stuff. I’m not certain but I don’t think this is the first time they’ve run the competition but it just so happened that after hearing about it the latest competition it fell during a small gap in work for me and I hadn’t done much front end stuff for a while so I thought what the hell why not give it a try.

You can see my efforts right here at cssoff.kamikazemusic.com.

I didn’t quite manage the first place and win myself a Mac Book Air (damn!) I didn’t even finish in the top 25. But the great thing is that you get some feedback at least and having received my email this morning I was still happy with a finish of 74th place, which out of over 400 entries I would consider a respectable showing. I would have liked to see some specific judge’s feedback but I guess that no bad comments is good news at least! The feedback I did get though showed above average scores in a number of the 11 categories including project size, markup cleanliness, semantics  and responsive implementation. I did lose a few points by scoring nothing in the legacy browser category which surprised me but I checked and I didn’t get round to any legacy implementation or tweaks for IE6 and 7 (browsers I wouldn’t normally support), mainly because I started to pick up some other client work toward the deadline so had to prioritise there!

Comparing my effort to the winning entries there’s certainly a bit more “pop” in the winners, I’d class mine as a solid, dependable, slightly less flashy, implementation next to them.

If  this competition comes around again (and I hope it does) I’d love to give it another try and I would recommend anyone who does front end markup give it a go if they have time. The feedback for your approach is great to read and the design is sure to have some interesting bits in for you to think about. It’s also nice to work on a project approaching it entirely with best practice in mind knowing that any work around or hack must be well thought out and justified.