CSS Cascading Style Sheets   by Paul Bell

CSS Cascading Style Sheets

CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) are used for the look and feel of your web page/site and can offer a great and simple way to make your website/page stand out from the rest in your field. Many years ago, well before CSS was invented, old style websites used tables to layout the different sections of a page. There were so many problems people must have been literally pulling their hair out - I know I was! One of the main problems with tables is the amount of excessive code that's required from having large tables and tables within tables etc. These dramatically increased the size of your website and slowed down the time that each web page takes to load. Another problem is that when you create the table it then decides to resize itself when live! So you go back to the table and input numbers in all the rows and columns...and it still went wonky - drove me crazy for years until CSS became the standard.

CSS uses external style sheets containing ALL of your style and layout code which is far more effective and easier to manage. By using CSS you can keep your site clean, tidy, and place objects wherever you want them to sit on your web page.

As mentioned above CSS uses separate files which contain all of your styling code. These files link directly to your web pages meaning that you don't need to place pages of extra code on them.

CSS files can be made using notepad, there are specific programs out there that lay out the code in a special way to ease reading. We use Dreamweaver, mainly because we use Dreamweaver to edit the majority of our website files. We would advise you to read up on CSS - this is a good book - Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design by Christopher Schmitt, Mark Trammell, Ethan Marcotte and Todd Dominey.

We would also advise you to goto http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Overview.en.html. They offer some excellent resources and advice to all beginners and professionals alike.

CSS should conform to W3 compatibility guidelines. There is a great validator on the W3 website that will check through your code and let you know of any issues that may have or will arise. Web standards are important so try and understand why and how to stay within the guidelines on the W3 website.

Once you get your head around using CSS you will find a whole new world open and an almost unlimited way to align/design your website. Enjoy.