Can anyone actually get the code from the home pages of MSN, Yahoo!, Yahoo! Canada and eBay?
I tried view Source and then copied it into an HTML editor, it took a while to decipher the code.

How can I make my websites look like Yahoo! or MSN's if I cannot understand why they used the CSS in the first place? Do they use special software to design the page?

By the way, if you can give me some tips on how to make my front page like theirs, it would be greatly appreciated.

Do you simply want to mimic the layout or the functionality too? If you want to mimic the layout then copying the source will give you an exact replica, although quite often images will not appear etc. The sites all use CSS to create the page. I think MSN and eBay store it in a separate file, while Yahoo has put a couple of thousand lines of CSS at the start of the HTML!



The reason they use CSS is to make pages load faster and to make editing a whole lot easier. With a CSS file you can simply set all text marked as, say, "example", to appear in bright blue with a yellow highlight. If you then decide that you want a green highlight round it you change it once in the CSS and all text marked as "example" will change, which saves a hell of a lot of time if you have 100-odd examples.

It is most likely they do use special software to design the page, something like Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver, but this is no more special than software that anyone else uses to design a web site. I don't think there is any software specifically made to design pages in the style of MSN, Yahoo and eBay

To make a front page in the style of one of the sites you just need to mimic the layout, but replace their content with your own. There's not really much else I can say to help. Just remember that copying source code directly is technically illegal and can people very annoyed, especially large international-global-mega-corporations like MSN, Yahoo and eBay.

Frown I do not think that is a good idea because Yahoo or others your are going to copy may have something to say about it. You could use there style But do not completely copy it. For it is iliegal.
But using their style is safe and a ok way.(If it wasn't then almost 2/3 of web pages wouldn't be their.

I've decided to use the content layout similar to Yahoo! + MSN's.
The navigation bar should be like the Yahoo! Sidebar.
The top panel should be like eBay's, only with different functional content.

There! I didn't copy and code directly (which is copyright infringement) and I combined stuff from all 3 sites.