Anyone here build their site based on grids?

Can you modify the grid system? Seems that graphics would be a lot more choppy this way.

I still use good old fashion pen and paper. I sketch it, and I also pen my div pixel sizes in there too.

As for the gird system. Never used it, and I am a professional web developer

By the way, everyone designs and builds their sites different. There is the "Trial and Error" type, which will just go and make it all up as they go (usually the creative challenged types. It takes a long time to develop a good layout, me included haha), and the "Structural" type, which will have everything done prior to programming. Everyone is different

There are pros and cons to CSS frameworks (which is what you're really talking about).

They can really help with bashing out consistent sites quickly. Especially as you become familiar with them.

But there's 2 major downsides to them, IMHO:

1) Their class naming structure tends to be too technical, and not semantically relevant. It can make reading and adjusting frustrating.

2) You tend to design around the framework, instead of writing CSS to reflect your design.

alignment is a key element in creating both structure and visual hierarchy... two necessary elements for visual communication.

A grid can assist with this. As long as you are not a slave to it (as that becomes boring and defeats the purpose of using a grid)

If you are building a large-scale website, it is not uncommon to rough out a series of generic CSS rules that define the grid so you can quickly line things up.

Once you've done this a lot, you realize that a chunk of that CSS can be carried from project to project and reused.

This is where the frameworks come from. They are usually tightly written, flexible systems that you can use to quickly rough out a site.

I have used 960gs for a few sites... its like any other framework, you need to use it a while to start to understand its strength and weaknesses...

I do use 960gs when necessary.

It depends a lot from the website you're building. A simple website may not need it, but a more magazine looking website, or newspaper looking, is easier to build with a grid.

I'm not sure, but I think Apple uses a grid, that themselves made.

Just a note: I do not recommend using a grid system if you're not experienced with CSS, specially floats.

If you want to build your own, that's not difficult too. I also would recommend downloading the development version of 960gs and reading it. It's fun to read these things (well, at least for me ) and also make you understand better what's going on behind the scenes.