Basic Guide to CSS
Learn what CSS is and why use it from this tutorial and redesign your site with CSS.
CSS background
CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheet(s). This is a technique, lately acquired world-wide recognition, to design quick, user-friendly and good looking sites (a mix hard to come by when using tables). It is used to separate presentation (positioning, styling and coloring) and content.
What is CSS exactly?
To be more precise, CSS files are files, containing element positioning, text formatting and other presentation data for a web site. A single .CSS file can be applied to every page on a web site.
What can CSS do?
As CSS is used to separate style from content, it is used whatever deprecated HTML tags could: position page elements, apply styling and coloring with several enhancements:
- position elements, regardless of their position in the HTML code
- apply any styling to all similar elements throughout the site
How does CSS help us?
Here is how exactly CSS helps the web site designer or editor:
- positioning elements on a page regardless of their order in the code pushes the content up for search engine spiders to crawl
- provides nice visual affects, which could earlier be achieved with graphics (hover effects, fixed positions, etc.) to impress your visitors with fast download speed and good effects at a time
- has a number of elements, supporting various media formats: handheld, print, aural (screen readers), etc. to enhance experience for all kinds of visitors
Benefits of CSS
CSS has a wide range of benefits, prompted by what it can do. Here are a couple:
- reduces download times greatly (by 20-80%) to convert more visitors to customers
- makes your web site adapt to user screen size
- eases web site creation and editing: apply similar styling to a single element throughout a site by changing just one file
- reduces the amount of time needed to redesign the site (site maintenance)
- give your visitors an ability to adjust font size with a single click (without using the browser buttons)
- provide text-only version by simply providing a different style sheet (modified to hide extra graphics and/or text from the user or printer)
Conclusion
Basically, just a couple of benefits are enough to force anyone to convert his/her web site to CSS design. And, finally, if nothing else makes sense to you as to why redesign with CSS, do it, because your everyone (including your competitors) either has done it already, is considering doing it, or will be doing it soon.
Update: read a general guide to CSS to apply it to your website.
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