How We can Help You and Your Website with Clean CSS Code
Being organized when writing css not only helps a website but after the project is complete it will help the new owner. That is why when we build a website for you it will be organized with comment sections so you will know what section of code is styling what section on your website. This makes it easier you (or me) to go back and make adjustments as your website grows with more original content. We take great pride in writing clean validated code that is organized and has comment sections.
What is CSS | A Basic Explanation?
A Brief History of Cascading Style Sheet
Cascading Style Sheet or for short CSS gives style to a website. In other words, it will format the html. In the early days of web design, you would add style to an element within the html element called inline style. That meant you would have to style EVERY h1, h2, h3, p, img… on every page. So, if you wanted to change the style of let’s say a p-tag you would need to go through all the p-tags to change them, very inefficient. This practice in now frowned upon and will be rejected when validated. It really doesn’t make sense anymore and is a waste of time so there is no need to discuss it any further.
Linking a Style Sheet
CSS can be on its own sheet or if you have a simple web page you can have the style in the head section of the html page within the tags <style>my styles</style>. Typically, a Style Sheet is named styles.css or style.css (always lower case no spaces) if you are linking it to an html page. In the head, it would look like this <link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”style.css”> to link it. But a style sheet can be named anything you want (all lower case no spaces) as long as the file extension is .css. With more complicated sites with a lot of style it makes sense to have multiple style sheets to keep track of it all. They can get very long and hard to find what you are looking for. All you need to do is use the link above, copy and paste it above or below the original link and change to name to something that makes sense to the new style sheet.
Leave comments in Your Cascading Style Sheet
It is important to train yourself to leave notes (comments) within the Cascading Style Sheet to describe what you are doing, why you are doing it and what section is being styled. When you first start it is a blank page but that blank page fills up quickly and it is easy to get lost. Use /* my notes here */ for you notes. Before you even start put the basics like each section in your css. That could include /* header */, /*nav*/, /*main*/, /*section id’s*/, /*footer*/…
Later we will get into what CSS and CSS3 does exactly and how to style your website. Stay tuned… But in the mean time check out out our html post.
