Manage your site with cascading style sheets
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) are useful because they let you control the look and organization of your entire site from one place. Even better, they require no additional investment or software. CSS is built into the HTML guidelines, which means all the necessary pieces are already hardwired into the hypertext language.
HTML offers a mediocre level of design control. You can manipulate fonts and, with a little finagling, you can place elements with a moderate degree of precision. CSS, however, offers tremendous design control. With it you can change the size and color of text. You can manipulate spacing. You can place objects with significant accuracy.
All of this is accomplished by creating styles for different parts of your site. For instance, if you want all your headlines to be uniform, you can create a headline style in your style sheet that specifies the size, color and appearance of headlines.
Headline style example:
.headline {color: 000066; font-size: 100%; font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight: bold;}
Then, when you place a headline tag around text in your HTML pages, that text will display according to the headline specifications you defined in your style sheet.
Headline tag example:
<div class="headline">Important headline</div>
End result:
If you decide the headline color isn't exactly what you're looking for, you can easily change every headline on your site by going back to the style sheet and altering the headline style. The new headline appearance will show up across your site.
Like HTML, mastering the ins and outs of CSS takes some time, but the basics are easy to tackle. To learn more, check out Webmonkey's CSS tutorial and look through the recommended links at the World Wide Web Consortium's official CSS Homepage.
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