Case Study: The Highway Safety Research Center

To get a better sense of many of these CSS3 benefits, let’s look at how a real site could be tangibly improved by using CSS3 in place of older web design techniques. Instead of picking on some stranger’s site, I thought I would critique one of my own.

Before CSS3

I designed and developed the CSS and HTML for the UNC Highway Safety Research Center’s site (www.hsrc.unc.edu) back in 2006. Figure 1.3 shows the HSRC home page. It hasn’t changed much since I originally built it, and isn’t nearly as complex as some of the inner pages, or certainly as many other web pages out there, but even so, it has a lot of images for such a simple page. You can see that it uses lots of rounded corners, subtle gradients, and shadows.