You don’t have to write the same CSS-code or (X)HTML-Markup over and over again. Whatever project you’re starting to work with, at some point you have to define classes and IDs you’ve already defined in your previous web-projects. To avoid unnecessary mistakes you might want to start not from a blank file, but from an almost “perfect” scratch. The latter might contain some basic definitions you’d write in your code anyway. However, once you’ve decided to create such a scratch, you need to make sure it is really bulletproof — besides, if the stylesheet also sets up optimal typographic rules and basic form styling you manage to kill two birds with one stone.

And this is where CSS Frameworks and CSS Reset are becoming important. Using them, you can get yourself a perfect default-stylesheet and markup, save your time and ensure the best quality of your code from the very beginning. But what are CSS Frameworks? And why do you need the Reset for?

Let’s take a look at the idea behind CSS Frameworks, their advantages and disadvantages, most popular CSS frameworks and dozens of default-stylesheets you can use designing a new web-site from scratch.
This article partially covers tools and techniques which use Grids. You might want to make sure you get the idea behind the grid-based design approach — from our article Designing With Grid-Based Approach.

You can find hundreds of CSS templates in our article Free CSS Layouts and Templates.
Please notice that this article takes a closer look at CSS Frameworks, not at extensive server-side programming frameworks such as CakePHP and also not at Web Development Environments such as Coda or Dreamweaver.