Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) has been around for several years and are now a fully integrating part of a website. Designing a website without CSS it’s inimaginable for the majority of web designers. And this is quite right because CSS are an invaluable addition to our pages making them sharper looking, easy to manage and a lot easier to update.

The concept is really a very simple one. A webpage is a sum of parts: For one side we need CONTENT. This is maybe the hard part nowadays, developing quality content. But content is not enough, we need to display this content in an attractive and professional way. This is where LAYOUT comes in. LAYOUT basically is the concept of creating divisions in a webpage that separate different kinds of information. So we can have in a simple webpage dvisions like: header, footer, sidebar and content. These divisions are in fact “containers” as their main function is exactly to contain information. HTML language as a specific TAG for this purpose: the DIV tag. Last but not least we need FORMATTING. A basic page without formatting will show every text the same way: same font, same size, same color, the same boring appearance. So CSS is going to spice things up. A Lot!

CSS is in fact an ASCII document. You can edit a CSS file with notepad, just as you might do to a HTML file (If we were back at the 90’s…). At your disposal there are some top notch softwares ou there, and i must say that my favorite is TOPSTYLE from Newsgator ( formerly Bradsoft ). You can grab a free working trial copy at www.newsgator.com and there’s even a completly free Lite version.

The beauty of the CSS model is that a single CSS file will be linked to every page in your website, thus giving you the power to configure the layout and formatting of the entire website from a single page. Lets say you have a 15 page website. In every page you have a footer container (division) with your email link and copyright information. If you want to change the color, the font, the background color, the link decoration, and other visual enhancments of that specific area you just need to change like 3 or 4 lines of plain simple code in your CSS file. As the file is linked to every page, the styles are loaded before the page loads and are reflected in real-time!

Thsi is not the only purpose of CSS, but if it was then you could just imagine how much time will you been saving to update your website, to say the least.

So, what can you really do with CSS? Basically you can :

1. Position text and graphics exactlily where you want them to appear
2. Format text and links individually
3. Create a sharp looking, professional layout that you can easily manage and change
4. Create simple rollover effects on links with text and images ( no javascript included )
5. Control spacings, paddings, margins, borders and even change the cursor look
6. Specify different measurement units such as centimeters, pixels, points and more
7. Manage different formattings for web and print.

CSS is not the future of web design it is the present, and anyone disregarding this reality as very poor changes to succeed online. Learning CSS is very easy and in no time you will be designing cutting edge websites and update their looks with no effort at all.

Be sure to check back for more on CSS learning and some useful tips and tricks.