CSS Basics - Cascading Style Sheets

Using external style sheets is a great way to change the whole look and feel of a website without actually altering the sites structure or content. A Cascading style sheet or CSS file is an external file that holds all element properties for your website; so within this file are font sizes, colour schemes, rollover images, background images, page structure, page margins, etc etc. The list is quite literally endless of the things you can control and manipulate within the CSS file. Since web standards (W3C) stated that websites should be constructed using XHTML and CSS, external style sheets have become around 50% of the initial development process.

The great thing about CSS is that it has to be one of the easiest languages to write, it uses plain English to define the element properties; and using a text editor such as Dreamweaver all the properties are made available from a list so you don’t even have to remember them.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that CSS is a simply a basic language, the full potential of CSS is now starting to rise to the surface, with publications such as Dan Cederholm’s Bulletproof Web design (http://www.simplebits.com/), which highlights the advanced layout structures and website effects that can be achieved using this language.

XHTML and CSS is a great starting point for any budding programmer. They teach you the basics and introduce you into other languages such as PHP and Javascript. You don’t need any fancy software to get started. Simply load up notepad. Get yourself a couple of tutorials of the internet, give it a go and see what you can achieve.