Css - Questions

[Anthony_Bullock]

Hi All,
Im not new to web design but my skills are very limited.

I am curious to know how CSS can help me with my website design no matter what aspect i try to go for.

I cannot create .php or .asp or even .cgi webpages as i am only experienced with .htm or .html webpages. I havent tried any in shockwave, livemotion, fireworks or flash as of yet.

I was curious to know the advantages of Css integration in my website. What could i get out of it, and how could i do it?

Could someone please helped a troubled youth ?

Thankyou in advance!

[Mark T.]

Hi there Anthony,
Have you already read some introductory articles on what CSS is about? Well, let me give you a brief breakdown:
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets. These are basically pieces of code, or seperate files, in which you can store all the markup of an entire website. This would mean that if you would like to change the colour of the text on your website, you don't need to plow through all the pages and edit every line of code where you refer to that colour. All you need to do is change the colour code in one file, at one place. You basically refer to that file and it's contents on every page.
This makes the life of a webmasters much easier, since updating or changing the layout of a website is done in the blink of an eye.

Let me give you a small practical example:

Let's say I have a very basic website, containing the following HTML code between the body-tag:

<font color="#0000FF">A lot of text here</font>

This part of the code would be repeated on all of the pages. But what if I wanted to change the colour of the text on all those pages to red instead of blue. The first way is to actually edit all those pages manually, and the second way is to use CSS to define all the bits and pieces of the layout of your website.

If I want to use CSS in this example, I would use the following code:

<p class="text">A lot of text</p>

In between the head-tags of the site I would point to our CSS file, like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="styles.css">

This would link our HTML-file to the stylesheet, so we can define the layout for this page and all the others in one file.
Our stylesheet would look like this:

p.text {
font-colour: #0000FF;
}

That is all there is to it. Now, do you see how it can benefit a webmaster? All you need to do is change one value to change the way your website looks (well, change it a bit ).

If you want to read up on this subject, I recommend you check out the article CSS is easy! by our resident coding Guru Kevin Yank. It should give you a basic understanding about what CSS can be used for, and by the end, you won't be using anything else anymore .

If you have any more questions, feel free to ask!

[Anthony_Bullock]

AHA - That post was the most informative post i have ever read on any forum i have ever been on.

I thankyou gracefully Mark T. for showing me and letting me into the whole new world of CSS for webdesign ease.

I wil definitley look into it

Thankyou yet again
THANKYOU

[Mark T.]

Not a problem .

[Meldryn]

w3c, the guys who make web standards, have a tutorial on just about anything on the web, including CSS. Might want to check it out, it's how I learned all the css I know and I like to think I'm pretty good at it since that is all I use now to format my pages. http://www.w3schools.com/css/default.asp

[Anthony_Bullock]

Thanx for the website m8 - will have a thorough look