So, way back in November I decided to enter the CSSOff competition from unmatchedstyle. I thought this would be a good opportunity to test my skills. As far as front-end development goes, I consider myself to be reasonably good but had nothing really to base this on. So I entered the competition!
The CSSOff design certainly was interesting
When I first saw the design I didn’t expect to do well. It was very “design” focused and I felt didn’t really lend itself to anything other than a competition based on who could do the most funcky CSS3 page in the time available. So, when I saw that my entry came 15th out of over 400 I was quite surprised!
As a developer, I didn’t expect my scoring for the design focused criteria to be very good. But luckily my code cleanliness and responsive implementation brought my score up!
Looking back at the competition now, I’m glad I entered. It gave me the opportunity to test my skills and see where I can improve (Thanks to the Judges for the feedback). The only downside I felt, as did others, was that I had hoped for a more challenging design. Sure this design had a few challenges of its own, but I was hoping for a design that would test peoples knowledge and understanding of complicated HTML5 layouts, semantic markup and accessibility – though accessibility was added in to the scoring last minute (Ironically like a lot of websites!).
Finally If anyone from the judging panel or unmatchedstyle happens to stumble across this, I would like to say thank you for running the competition and scoring the entries. It’s surely not a small task to judge over 400 entries for a competition of this nature!
For anyone interested, you can see my entry here.