Hi maya,
I've had time to review the files you sent. Basically, all the problems you're having come down to malformed HTML code. Some examples from your 'contact' page example:
Code:
<link href="style1.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" /><!but this not exactly like the book, page78m where the head seems to be closed differently-->
Comments must begin with <!--, not just <!.
Code:
<head>
<title>Contact Us at Bilingual-XWord</title>
...
<head>
You must end a <head> tag with a </head> tag, not another <head> tag.
Code:
<div id="bodycontent">
<body>
You cannot place a <div> outside the <body> of your document. All of your page content must be contained between <body> and </body>.
Code:
<div id="header">
<h1>Crossword Puzzles for English-speakers learning Spanish
<h1> (AND vice versa)
</div> <!--end of header div -->
Each <h1> tag should end with a matching </h1> tag. In this case, you have two opening <h1> tags, and no </h1> tags at all. Did you mean to create two level-one headings here, or just one? Did you mean the text "(AND vice versa)" to be a part of the same heading as the preceding text?
Code:
<div ID="more information">
In XHTML, all tags and attributes should be in lowercase, so ID should be id. Additionally, ID values cannot contain spaces.
Code:
<p> <h3> To find out more, contact <a
href="mailto: alinde@mac.com">email
alinde@mac.com</a>.<p>
Again, it looks like you've got a second opening <p> tag where I believe you meant to have a closing </p> tag. In this case, however, you've also started a level-three heading (<h3>) inside the paragraph (<p>). Not only can you not have headings inside paragraphs, but you've neglected to mark where the heading should end with a </h3> tag.
Now, getting back to your question of why your CSS styles are not applying to this page, in this case your CSS sets the color of text inside of paragraphs. In the last snippet of code above, you've tried to start a level 3 heading inside a paragraph. Because this is illegal, the browser is forced to assume that the paragraph ends immediately before the <h3> tag, and consequently there is no actual paragraph text for your CSS to apply a color to.
My advice to you at this point is to take a step back from CSS and focus on getting your HTML code right first. Make use of the W3C's HTML validator to correct all the errors in your HTML code, and then try applying CSS styles to it. You should find things work much better that way.
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