If you genuinely understand html and css, these sorts of things literally fall together in about five minutes with notepad.
They're boxes...
...After I said this, I had to see if I was really fast enough to do that in notepad. I'm high, I have nothing better to do, and I figure I should be able to back what I say up.
I almost got too lazy, but then I just committed, cause it would only
be five minutes, right?
Started at:
Honor system here I guess, everything
between this time and the next time
was all that I typed between those two
times. After I finished I copied it
out into coda, saved it to see that it
worked (it did), fixed the formatting
for readability, and pasted it back
in. Yes I really put the font family
and colors in, I don't know why. I
figured why not?
2:35:17
<html>
<head>
<title>Speed Challenge Impromptu</title>
</head>
<style>
body {
background: #000;
color: #fff;
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
font-family: helvetica;
font-size: 12px;
border-bottom: 1px solid #999;
}
#wrapper {
width: 960px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 5px;
border-left: 1px solid #999;
border-right: 1px solid #999;
background: #222;
}
#header {
height: 160px;
background: #444;
border: 1px solid #aaa;
}
#menu {
margin-top: 5px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
height: 50px;
background: #555;
border: 1px solid #aaa;
}
#content {
height: 800px;
background: #666;
border: 1px solid #aaa;
margin-bottom: 5px;
}
#footer {
height: 25px;
background: #444;
border: 1px solid #aaa;
}
</style>
<body>
<div id="wrapper">
<div id="header">
</div>
<div id="menu">
</div>
<div id="content">
</div>
<div id="footer">
</div>
</div>
</body>
</html>
2:41:52
Not bad for being totally unprepared in a bit over six minutes. I assure you I was rather slow in typing and thinking, I wouldn't doubt a sub two minute time. All the colors were guessed as were the sizes. It's not ideal for a production website, but it's great to figure out what's going where initially.
I didn't have columns in mine, you can basically copy those boxes inside of themselves styling-wise and do quite a lot row-wise. Fixed widths and floating rights would get the job done for columns.
This is what a finished version could look like. Obviously taking much longer than five minutes, but still not bad.