CSS templates

Cascading Stylesheets become more and more important in today’s webdesign.

But before you decide to get started using CSS you should know why CSS is so important and what its advantages are.

1. The content is separated from the design

Because you are able to create a separate Stylesheet and link it to all your webdocuments, you have great control over how your website looks. So if you want to change a certain aspect of your page, you only need to alter one file: your Stylesheet!

This Of course, generates some great flexibility. This flexibility is not available when your website is using tables for layout, inline font tags or inline defined colors.

A single CSS file can contain positioning, layout, font, colors and style information for an entire web site.

2. You site uses less bandwidth and loads faster

Because stylesheets are so lightweight, your website will load much faster. The main reason is because you do not need table layouts anymore for the positioning of elements. Since text loads really really fast your website will be visible in a flash.

This means that visitors will be happier when surfing your website. They only have to download the Stylesheet once, and it’s automatically reused for every page. So the only thing that needs to be loaded is the actual content.

On average a website will load five to ten times faster if it makes use of cascading style sheets.

3. Your website will automatically gain better search engine results

With CSS, you can position any element, anywhere you want. So if your menu is at the bottom of your HTML document, you can bring it up using absolute positioning. The reason this is useful is to make sure the search engine spiders pick up the main content first.

Another advantage you automatically gain is that your HTML code is much cleaner. So the search engine spider will not have to separate the junk code from the real content.

So make sure you put your logo text and your menu at the bottom of your HTML document at put it at the top using CSS!

4. CSS is compatible with newer browsers

Because more and more browsers are used other than Internet Explorer on a Windows machine, you need to be sure that your website is accessible by all major and newer browsers.

By using webstandards, defined by the w3c, you are making sure your content is viewable in the future.

Because there are so many browsers these days, it is impossible to test your website in all these browsers on different configurations. Coding to standards is then the only practical solution.

5. CSS can be used to display the same content on different media.

Because you are able to define different stylesheets for different media you have great flexibility in presenting your content.

The printer for example, is a medium on itself. If someone prints out your website, you will be able to modify the look of it. Add an extra black and white logo, remove the advertisements and change the colors to black and white values. It’s all done easily by using cascading stylesheets. And the best thing is, visitors do not even have to know you created a new Stylesheet especially for the printer.

Stylesheets can also be created specifically for PDA’s and such. As you will understand, this adds some great flexibility to the presentation of your web document.

Conclusion

Cascading Style Sheets are created to make things easier. It gives you great control of your website and makes your visitors happy when they are surfing your website.

You are prepared for the future and will gain better search engine results automatically. Start using CSS to its full potential today! It will suit you well.

About the Author
Hilco van der Meer is an expert on Cascading Style Sheets. He is known as the creator of the “How To Master CSS” course.

This course discusses CSS in a fun and easy way. Apart from the book, he also created CSS training videos for the course. The course can be found at:http://www.HowToMasterCSS.com

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These instructions pertain to Dreamweaver 4, although other versions would likely have similar instructions.

When you edit a CSS stylesheet that controls the text in your CSS template document, you instantly reformat all of the text controlled by that CSS stylesheet. Your edits affect all the documents linked to the style sheet.

To edit an external CSS style sheet:

• Open any document that is linked to the external CSS style sheet that you want to change.
• Do one of the following: Choose “Window > CSS Styles”, or click “CSS styles” in the Launcher.
• In the CSS Styles panel, right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh) and choose the Edit Style Sheet from the pull-down menu.
• Choose “Text > CSS Styles > Edit Style Sheet”.
• In the Edit Style Sheet dialog box, select the name of the external style sheet and click Edit. A second Edit Style Sheet dialog box displays the styles in the external style sheet. Select the style you want to edit.
• Edit the style however you wish.
  Click Save when you have finished editing styles.

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Learn more

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CSS means “Cascading Style Sheets“. CSS is a system of rules that directly effect the display properties of your web pages such as colors, fonts, colors, and layouts. CSS style blocks are also commonly referred to as rules. These rules can be embedded into an individual HTML page or placed in an external file that will control many individual pages on your website. Thus changing a property in one place in the linked style sheet will immediately make that change on every web page that is linked to it.

“CSS Web Template” is a website design created using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) technology. Cascading stylesheets provide web developers an easy way to format and to style web pages. CSS will be used even more because it is seen the same way by all browsers, making it the best option during the browser wars.

CSS templates allow enhanced browser and platform compatibility (CSS supporting browsers are used by 99,98% of existent web surfers). Your website will look perfect in Windows, Unix and Mac browsers. The template is primarily tested on multiple platforms to ensure better requirements compliance.

Style Sheets are the easiest way to provide a default font styling for HTML. So you can modify the whole text and link colors on every page by editing just a single CSS file! CSS also makes your coding much easier because you don’t have to repeat the many formatting tags. This streamlined code equals faster download time and reduced bandwidth usage.

CSS templates show 100% compatibility with Macromedia Dreamweaver and MS Frontpage. Other web editors also handle this technology easier than the usual HTML code.

Good news - now you don’t need to fight with complicated HTML tables trying to modify the layout of your site. Our CSS templates use blocks instead of tables. So you can move content blocks by simply dragging ‘n’ dropping them in your HTML editor. Moreover, these tags are better understood by JavaScript and other web programming languages.

CSS technology is a great step forward in web development. Separated content and presentation adds more flexibility to your website. And, you’ll have no problems with future modification of your website. All templates are based on w3c.org technologies and standards that make your website much more user-friendly.

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Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to create fast loading pages, increase your search engine rankings, and modify your whole site with one style sheet. So why don’t more people use them? This is because they got so used to html design and are afraid or too lazy to upgrade their skills. Some will also use ready made templates that contain flashy graphics, bloated code and sometimes even contains hidden code embedded in the page. In this series of articles I will show you how to create a simple web site using CSS, so you will have no excuse to begin incorporating them into your future designs.

What are Cascading Style Sheets?

Cascading Style Sheets is the name of a simple language that allows you to add any style (font, colors, graphics, links, layouts) to your web pages.

Benefits of Cascading Style Sheets

1. Separate content from presentation - you can separate your HTML markup, text, graphics and multimedia from presentation.

2. Consistent site wide look and feel consistency - you can apply one style for 100s of web pages all at once. So if you had to change the color of all pages on your site, you only have to edit one style sheet. This saves you a huge amount of time, especially if you had to edit each page separately.

3. Web site maintenance - apart from being able to make site wide changes easily through one CSS file, the clean code it generates makes it easier to update. Properly marked up web pages permit them to be maintained by more than one person. It will also work in more browsers. Web site redesigns will take much less time.

4. Improve search engine rankings - search engines generally spider the code at the top of your web page first. For most sites that means the navigation bar will be spidered first (resides at top of page code). CSS enables you to position the code for your content at the top making your page search engine friendly. Properly marked up HTML pages can easily found and properly categorized by search engines

5. Fast loading - CSS reduces the amount of tags used therefore producing clean code. Tableless design can reduce your load time by 25% to 50%.

6. Reduce bandwidth - compacting the amount of code used will reduce the amount of bandwidth needed to host your web pages. Therefore you won’t have to pay higher fees when adding more web documents to your site.

7. Accessibility - increasing accessibility with CSS means being able to serve web content to a larger audience, increasing web site usability, even for non-disabled people. Content can easily be formatted for projection as well as screen display. Tableless layouts display well on hand-helds.

8. Improve the printing of web pages - most printers will only allow you to print a portion of the web page. With CSS your whole document can be printed.

When you use CSS it becomes quick and easy to apply new styles that can not only effect all styles on your web page but even your whole site.

In the next article I will explain how to layout a web page using CSS.

About the Author
Herman Drost is the Certified Internet Webmaster (CIW) owner and author of http://www.iSiteBuild.com. Affordable Web Site Design and Web Hosting. Subscribe to his “Marketing Tips” newsletter for more original articles. mailto:subscribe@isitebuild.com. You can read more of his in-depth articles at: http://www.isitebuild.com/article

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