Designing and creating a good looking and user friendly web site can be quite a challenge. Many web designers and webmasters are turning to Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for help. CSS allows a designer to separate the formatting style (fonts, background, color, border, etc.) from the HTML code itself. The use of cascading style sheets will allow one to create a better designed, uniform web site where all the pages style will match. CSS is becoming standard for most web sites and there are many advantages to begin using Cascading Style Sheets today.
You have two options when it comes to cascading style sheets; internal or external.
Internal style sheets are located within the header of your pages HTML code. This method of style sheets is beneficial if you are using a different style for each page or just one individual page. Also, with internal CSS, all of your code is located in one file making it easy to make quick changes or improvements.
The other type of CSS, external, is more common. External CSS is used by created a file with a .css extension and can be done with any text editor like notepad or a web design program like FrontPage or Dreamweaver. When you use external cascading style sheets, all of your web pages will look to this file for its style guide which will result in a very uniform web site. Since all of your web sites use this CSS file, you can make changes site wide by just altering your CSS file. Another benefit of using external CSS is it limits the size of your HTML code and makes it more manageable for you to maneuver. Since you are separating your HTML code from your CSS, it also will result in faster loading for your visitors. The cascading style sheet file will only have to download once to be applied to all of your other pages. And since your HTML files are a smaller file size, they will also load quicker. The smaller file size will also help search engine spiders crawl more of your page and index the important content without wasting its time crawling over your old formatting. CSS allows you to use tags to identify your headers which search engines deem more important and separate them from the text body. Using cascading style sheets on your web site can also help the visually impaired or those who only want to see the content of your page. Users can insert their own CSS files to enlarge the text and make it easier for them to read.
There are not many disadvantages to using cascading style sheets. The main issue that people run into when trying out CSS is its consistency with different browsers. Your content may show up different in Explorer than Firefox so you will want to check your web site out with both browsers. Overall, there are far more many reasons to start using CSS on your web site.
This is the best explanation of how to use CSS I have EVER read. Thanks
Comment by Allison Anderson — May 15, 2008 @ 1:53 am