Sitepoint’s resident CSS expert Rachel Andrew is being interviewed by Kevin Yank in this week’s podcast. Rachel Andrew is the author of the best selling CSS book the CSS anthology. Rachel is an authority on CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), a complex topic, which I think needs a lot of explaining. You can listen or read the transcript.
If you missed my earlier article on what is CSS coding, in it’s simplest form it’s a style rule. Style rules combine to create the presentation of your website. The rules can be mixed-in with the HTML code or they can be all together in a separate style sheet. The advantages of using CSS include cleaner, faster-loading pages, google likes sites with style sheets because the text is easier for the search engine spiders to find and index, as a webmaster your site is much easier to update and you can build a much better looking website.
To ease the steep learning curve with CSS style rules, Stefan Mischook has a website devoted to teaching you how to use this powerful design language. His goal is to make CSS fun and easy to understand. The CSS tutorial has a written introduction for beginners complete with a video. This is followed by a series of tutorials and even an active, free forum with a huge variety of question and answer discussion.
Nathaniel or tutvid has created a long (30 minutes) but excellent video on how to build a simple webpage using dreamweaver, with HTML for function and CSS for presentation, so you can see how the two different languages fit together to build a webpage. The video has nearly 100K views, 5 star ratings and a lot of positive comment feedback from the youtube community. What’s really useful is to see how CSS works in context with webpage building.
Designing with CSS is not the easy option, but the results are worth the effort.
