CSS file designing requires great skill and expertise and the developers of the site should understand all the positive and negative aspects for venturing out. Planning and organizing these things is the best way to handle the issue as you can only understand the things that you need to do to develop the site and the things that need to be avoided to maintain the site and keep it moving. Keeping in mind the different benefits and advantages that can be used to develop a flawless system are:

The content of the page should be separated from the design as you are able to create a separate style sheet that helps in linking all your web documents easily. This way you also have control over the design and the way your website looks. And it sure becomes very easy if you want to alter a certain page you only need to your style sheet. This is due to your site being flexible and if you have a layout plan in your site then your site can't be flexible and it will be very difficult for you to make any changes. The CSS file has it all a sit contains all the necessary things like the font size, color, layout and positioning and nearly all the information for the entire website.

When you sue CSS files to your site uses less bandwidth and loads faster as the CSS file makes it lighter. And the real reason is that you don't need table layouts for positioning the elements. Because the text starts loading very fast everything becomes visible very fast. This way the site visitors will be able to get access to things very fast as they only need to download once and they can have the advantage of looking at all the pages. So basically if you use a CSS file then your website will load 4 to 5 times faster and make surfing easy and fast around your site.

Using CSS files will increase the results of your site in the search engines and you can easily position any element wherever you want in a second. The main reason behind this idea is t bring the search engine spiders pick up the main content very fast.

Another plus point is that this way your HTML code is much cleaner so the search engine spider will be able to locate it easily from the useless content. So you should be careful in putting your logo and menu at the end of the HTML document when you use the CSS file system as this is the way to get it fats processed.

Your site will be the best if it works easily for all browsers and using CSS files will give you this advantage as CSS is compatible with all browsers.

Coding your website according to the standard browsers helps a lot in making it accessible to the many browsers that are being used on the internet.

CSS also helps in using the same content on different media as you are able to define new style sheets due to it and you also have a great flexibility because of it.

Using cascading styles sheets has made web design enjoyable again. Being able to easy adjust and change site on a whim is very enjoyable. Using CSS Font can alter a web site appearance quickly.

Designing without tables by using CSS layouts is fast becoming the new standard on the Web because of the benefits mentioned in my previous article. Web browsers used these days are now able to render web pages proficiently. In this article I will endeavor to create a basic 2 column CSS layout which you can use for future design projects.

1. Divide your page into sections - the div id tags allows you to create distinct divisions on your web page.
They are identified with a unique id. You can then add a style (css selector) that specifically applies to the div of that id. Remember to include the DOCTYPE (to render your page accurately in the browsers) and meta tags (enables search engines to spider your pages).wrapper: is the div that wraps around all the other divs like a container for the page elements. header: defines the top banner of the page main: defines the main content of the page nav: defines the navigation of the page footer: defines the footer and sub-navigation of the page

2. Create the CSS code - the CSS code styles the page as a centered 2 column CSS layout with a navigation bar and a footer. The div#wrapper style creates the centered box which acts as a container for the rest of the page content. The width: 80% rule sets the width of the div. The background-color:#FFFFFF rule creates a white background for the div. The margin-top: 50px and margin-bottom: 50px rules create a space of 50 pixels for the top and bottom margins for the div itself.

The proper way to center a block-level element with CSS is to set margin-left: auto and margin-right: auto. This instructs the browser to automatically calculate equal margins for both sides, thus centering the div. The border: thin solid #000000 rule adds a border around the outer div. The rest of the CSS code styles the divs for the header, footer, nav, and main content.The div#header and div#footer styles set margins and padding for those divs. In addition, div#header includes the text-align: center rule to center the header text, and div#footer includes the border-top: thin solid #000000 rule to create a border along the top edge of the div to replace the horizontal rule above the footer in the table-based layout.

The div#nav and div#main styles create the two columns in the middle of the centered box. In the div#nav style, the float: left rule pushes the div to the left side of its parent element (the wrapper div), and the width: 25% rule sets the div's width to 25 percent of the parent element. With the nav div floated to the left and limited to a set width, it leaves room for the main div to move up to the right of the nav div, thus creating the two-column effect. The div#main style includes the margin-left: 30% rule to keep the main text aligned in a neat column instead of spreading out below the nav column. The main div's left margin is set to a value slightly larger than the width of the nav div.

If links are placed elsewhere on the page they will inherit the same properties as above..a blue link that hovers to red. What if you wish to create another set of links that are a different color and on passing your mouse over them they are underlined.

4. Create the bottom navigation - to include this in the section of the page, I use div#footer and code each link accordingly. To make the list go horizontally I use: display: inline; Now that I have finished creating my style sheet I want to shorten the code on page by linking it to my external style sheet. Here's how:

5. Create an external style sheet - copy and paste all the css code (without these tags: ) into notepad and label it something like "style sheet". Place this style sheet between the head tags of your web page. This will reduce the code on your page so it will load fast tlus the search engines can more easily spider your web page.

6. Add content to your page - after you have got your page looking correctly, you can add more content to it. Adjustments can easily be made to any style on the page (or your whole site) by simply editing one style sheet.

7. Upload your files - be sure to upload your web pages and style sheet to the root directory of your server.

8. Validate your code - be sure to validate your xhtml
code: http://validator.w3.org/ and css code:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/ and make corrections where necessary.

9. Check browser compatibility and screen resolution - check that your page renders well in the popular browsers (IE6, NN7, Firefox) If you are beginning with CSS layouts, implement then slowly by making small changes to your pages i.e. creating a style sheet for your main headers and fonts only. As you
become more familiar with CSS you may eventually build all your future sites with CSS layouts.

CSS in Your Web Design

Posted by Anonymous | 10:24 PM | | 0 comments »

CSS, short for Cascading Style Sheets, is a method of web design that allows the web designer to control the display of the site from a single file included into each page. Cascading Style Sheets separate the style of a page such as layout, colour and fonts from the content of the page such as text and images.

A style sheet is a file, much like an HTML file. Style sheets can be opened and edited or created in any text editor (we use Scintilla Text Editor because it has syntax highlighting for many languages).

Using CSS you can implement changes across your entire site quickly from the one CSS file. You can update colours and fonts, positioning, etc easily from this one CSS file. This change will cascade across every page on the site. The CSS file can be referenced by each html file on the site.

Using CSS you can alter the appearance of any HTML element on your page. This is very useful to change their default look. For instance, the h1 tag displays huge, black, "ugly" text. However, due to the importance of the h1 tag for SEO purposes, you really don't want to abandon them completely. Using CSS you can alter completely the appearance of the h1 (or any other) tag.

Table-less design is used to control page layout without using HTML tables. Rather, the "tables", ie, positioning and text are controlled using CSS. This has many advantage, some are listed below.

Advantages of CSS

CSS has far more style attributes than HTML. Your sites content to code ratio is maximised. By removing the style info and placing it in a separate file, the content to code ration is maximised which has great advantages from a SEO point of view.

Your pages may load faster. Many web browsers (depending on user settings) cache content (store local copies on your hard drive). This means that once the style sheet is cached, your web browser may use the local copy for subsequent page views. This saves time and bandwidth.

Change display based on the media:

There is flexibility in presenting the content. You can use a style sheet for different media. So, If the user is browsing on a mobile device with a smaller screen you could display content differently. Similarly, if a user wants to print a page, you could use CSS to format the page for a printer. This might include removing navigation bars, etc

Disadvantages of CSS

Not all browsers render Style Sheets equally. Some Style Sheet element may be supported while others not.
There is relief thought; latest versions of browsers are becoming more standards-compliant