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Title: DESIGNING WITH STYLE
Author: Richard Igoe
Article:
One important aspect of good design is to give your site a theme
and coherence. A great deal of this can be done using a
stylesheet.
Using stylesheets is not difficult. In fact it makes the task of
designing a website that much easier. However many new designers
don't use them.
But before dispelling some of the confusion, let us look at the
advantages of using CSS - cascading style sheets.
ADVANTAGES
1) You can use an external stylesheet to control the look and
appearance of your whole website, such as the font size, style,
and color, the background image, the background color, etc... by
changing a single file. You don't need to edit every page.
2) Linking to a stylesheet reduces the size of your web pages
and gives you much cleaner HTML code because you don't need to
specify the font, color, or "style" of every element on your
page.
3) Web pages are displayed differently on different browsers and
platforms. For example a 10pt font looks fine on a PC but
becomes too small on a Mac. You can use a browser-detection
script in the header of your pages which will link to a
different stylesheet depending on which browser is being used.
The rest of this article assumes you have a basic understanding
of HTML tags, the code behind your web pages. If not you can get
our simple HTML tutorial at -
http://www.thewebseye.com/HTML.htm.
Now using stylesheets is actually easier than HTML. The main
cause of confusion is that you can either link your web pages to
an external stylesheet, or you can include the style sheet in
the header of individual web pages inside STYLE tags. Web design
software does not always make this clear unless you read the
HELP pages in detail. Forget your web design software for a
moment, because it is easier to understand stylesheets if you
take a look under the surface.
An external style sheet can be as simple and powerful as this:
BODY { background-image: url(images/mybackground.gif);
background-color: #FFFFFF; }
P { FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; FONT-SIZE:
12pt; COLOR: navy }
You copy and paste the above in Notepad, Wordpad or other text
or HTML editor, and save it as "mystyle.css". Put this
stylesheet in the same directory as your HTML files. Note the
".css" extension is important. Then you link your web pages to
this stylesheet by putting the following code in the HEAD area
of your pages.
< link rel="STYLESHEET" type="text/css" href="mystyle.css" >
It is now easy to change the background image or color of your
site by simply changing the variables in the stylesheet. You can
also change how the text in your in your website looks Anything
in "P" tags on your web pages takes on the "P" attributes
specified in the stylesheet. The above will make your pages
display Verdana text (and you give the option of Helvetica and
sans-serif in case your visitor's computer does not support the
first choice) which is 12 pt and navy.
The next source of confusion is the use of the CLASS attribute.
But this is also real easy and very powerful. It is best
explained by adding another style to our stylesheet explained
above.
P.redtext { FONT-FAMILY: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;
FONT-SIZE: 12pt; COLOR: red }
Now what this allows you to do is make certain blocks of text
red. In your web pages, instead of a simple "P" tag around your
text, you would add class="redtext" to the "P" tag and the text
inside the tags would be red.
You can have any number of classes and assign classes not only
to P tags, but also to your table data TD, your links "A" and
any tag contained in the "BODY" of your web pages. And by simply
changing the stylesheet you can change the look of your whole
site. Are you beginning to see the power of using style?
It is however important to realize Netscape and Internet
Explorer deal with stylesheets differently and Netscape does not
support them as fully as IE. Netscape basically takes the
inheritance a step too far. The only way to find out what goes
and what doesn't is by trial and error, however there are a
couple of resources which will help you a long way with
understanding more about stylesheets. We have listed links to
these resources at http://www.thewebseye.com/stylesheets.htm.
With simple stylesheets you should have no problem and they will
really help to make sure your site keeps a certain amount of
uniformity and cohesion.
About the author:
Richard Igoe - http://www.TheWebsEYE.com. Get his latest Free
Website Success Course by sending a blank email to
mailto:wsc@quicktell.net and find out whether you have the 6
essentials of a successful site!
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