I’m pretty sure that most of you, especially in the early stages of learning basic HTML, painstakingly edited every single page of your website to look consistently the same with the other pages. Every font style, every attribute associated with your forms, every border style, you edited the tags one by one, page by page, until it seems you’ve memorized the coding of all your pages. And then you gave yourself a congratulatory pat on the back, and relax until your next layout revamp.
Changing layouts would always be pain in the neck, even if you use helpful tools like SiteGrinder, since it entails that you would once again undergo the painstaking and tedious process of manually editing the attributes, tags, design and coding of all your pages. This was how you operated before, until, one fateful day, a kind soul enlightened you on the miracle that is CSS.
For the uninitiated, what is CSS? It stands for Cascading style Sheet, which is basically a language that handles the look and formatting of your page. It can be applied to HTML and XHTML, or to any xml type document. It works similarly to HTML, and in fact, these two languages are used in tandem. Basically, all the complicated and manual coding you do to each font, header, border, background, and any other element of your website can be placed in a single document, and this single document, unlike an HTML page, can be linked in the <head> part of the coding for your website, and all the styles indicated in the CSS will be applied to that web page.
In this sense, you only need to edit one page, instead of all the pages in your whole website. This makes changing a layout or revamping the whole site definitely much easier.
So how do you use CSS in your site? Well, first of all, read up on CSS! The tags and words used are pretty much the ones you also use in CSS. The only thing you might want to really study are the different attributes-it’s always helpful to keep a site with the complete list of CSS attributes open, just in case. Then, start with the basics-open Photoshop, create your layout, either use Sitegrinder crack or manually encode everything, set the site up. Keep in mind that while you’re doing all this, you should have an idea of what kinds of border, hyperlink, header, fonts and scroll styles would best fit your website design.
When you’re done, attach the CSS as an external CSS in the head part of your HTML file.
The best part about this is that whenever you have a layout change, you need only to change the external CSS files You can actually leave all the styles in the CSS, and leave your HTML file as un-styled as possible. You can even make a lot of web layouts now, and assign a CSS file for each design. Online programs and social networking sites usually provide an editor for you to personalize your own page in their site, and some have the option of linking external CSS documents. Now go forth and amaze your friends with this newfound CSS knowledge!